THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY

Ivan G, Year 11 writes...

The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s 2022 Debate was a delightful, if overwhelming, exercise in embodying everyone’s new favourite prefix, meta-.

The four-letter phenomenon has its roots in Greek, where its meaning is certainly less abstract. The Greek meta- is analogous to the Latin prefixes ad-, as in adjacent, and post-, as in postgraduate. For example, Aristotle’s Metaphysics was so named because it came after his Physics. However, as often occurs in language, the original meaning of meta- has been overshadowed by a new one. In the post-early twentieth century sense, it is used to describe a self-referential undertaking such as metamathematics, the study of mathematics with its own – that is, mathematical – methods. It is in this sense that this year’s debate, an at-times heated discussion, focused on the topic of consciousness. It was, perhaps, even as meta- as a thing can get, for it involved - nay, revolved around - the most profoundly selfreferential thing there is: to put it aptly, thinking about thinking.

More specifically, the challenge to be tackled by the panel, consisting of neuroscientist Anil Seth and philosophers, Philip Goff, Louise Antony, and Maja Spener, was the so-called hard problem of consciousness – the issue arising from attempts to explain how, and why, humans have conscious experience. Some thinkers, including Seth, hold that this apparently unsolvable hard problem is merely the product of a series of solvable easy problems, relating to our understanding of the physical processes within the brain. Others, such as David Chalmers, who was mentioned not once but twice throughout the course of the debate, are adamant that even once every easy problem has been dispensed with, and we have a comprehensive physical understanding of the brain, the hard problem will remain in all its terrifying glory. We can know everything about the brain and yet be utterly unable to say how it is connected to first-hand conscious experience. To contrast the easy and the hard, consider: an individual is pricked by a needle. Here, the easy problems are the ones relating to understanding the biochemical activity of the central nervous system in reaction to the prick, whilst the hard problem involves asking the question of why these processes are accompanied by the feeling of pain.

A major concern, discussed by the panel, was the challenge posed to scientific research on consciousness by the inherent subjectivity of conscious experience. For lack of better words, feelings can be felt only by the individual feeling them, meaning that, unlike the physical processes – hormonal responses, electrical impulses – responsible for them, they are completely unavailable for that which science needs most - objective assessment. In his 1974 paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, philosopher Thomas Nagel uses this discrepancy between objectively observable physical and subjectively observable conscious phenomena to argue against a reductionist view like Seth’s, claiming that a physicalist account of conscious experience is impossible on the grounds that “every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”

Personally, I found the debate to be a non-daunting reintroduction to the puzzle of consciousness. Being the first debate I have attended, it was also somewhat of a surprise, I must admit. Little did I expect those few moments of what some may brand intellectual ferocity and others, well, shouting.