THE NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

UNCOVERING THE HARD PROBLEM

Abstract

In this essay, I will explore the hard problem of consciousness and its implications for guiding neuroscience. Firstly, I will explicate how the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century is inevitably guided by philosophical assumptions in scientific disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience, while presenting how this field has fundamentally neglected the phenomenological discourse implicit in its assumptions of consciousness. Specifically, I attempt to show that the hard problem has an explanatory gap between associating the relationship of phenomenological aspects of experience to physical aspects of the brain, as described by David Chalmers. Then, I will describe the pitfalls of prior neurophilosophical models based on “neural correlates”. Subsequently, I will examine novel models that may fulfill Chalmers’ remedy of exploring the substrates of experience, which can be invariably tied to the brain. A systematic analysis of these novel models will be provided while assessing their strengths and limitations in order to push further toward closing the explanatory gap. Building on the strengths of these models, whilst bearing in mind their limitations, altered states of consciousness will be explored in the penultimate section to understand how phenomenological experience can be manipulated to produce changes in the brain. I conclude by providing directions from which the hard problem can be approached with the appropriate discourse between phenomenology and neuroscience.