A Study on the Metaphysics of Conscious Experience

1. Introduction

The place of minds in reality is a problem that philosophers across traditions and time have

thought about. Within western philosophy, since Descartes, this has taken the shape of the

mind-body problem. In contemporary western analytic philosophy, one particular aspect of this

age-old problem has evoked considerable attention and has come to be known as the hard

problem of consciousness or the hard part of the mind- body problem1 - the metaphysical

question of how there can be conscious, mental phenomena in a physical world .

Metaphysics is the philosophical study of what-there-is and what-it-is.2 The metaphysical

question about the mind is then the question of whether our ontology ought to include the

mind (and mental properties), or whether an ontology of physical entities would suffice.

Further, one also needs to explicate what one means by the mind and physical entities

before one can answer questions of what there is. Broadly, there are two major responses to this

question. On the one hand is physicalism, the view that all concrete phenomena including minds

and mental phenomena are physical or grounded in physical phenomena. On the other is dualism, the

view that minds and mental phenomena are a second kind distinct from the physical. While the

orthodoxy in contemporary analytic philosophy is physicalism, versions of dualism

have remained influential, if only as the opponents that physicalists argue against.