Federica Melis

The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we have the intuition that there is a hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmers briefly notes that my phenomenal powers view may be able to answer to this challenge in a way that avoids problems (having to do with avoiding coincidence) facing other realist views. In this response, I will briefly outline the phenomenal powers view and my main arguments for it and—drawing in part on a similar view developed by Harold Langsam—discuss how more precisely its answer to the challenge would go.

Hume held that we have no experience of causal powers, because no causes are inconceivable without their effects. I argue that phenomenal properties, such as pain and pleasure, actually satisfy Hume’s inconceivability criterion, at least to a very close approximation, as well as two related criteria involving prediction and explanation. These phenomenal properties therefore constitute causal powers of just the kind Hume was looking for. The same considerations can be extended to other, perhaps all, phenomenal properties. I call this the phenomenal powers view. In addition to the argument from inconceivability and related criteria, I also offer a harmony argument, according to which the phenomenal powers view offers the best explanation for psychophysical regularities involving pain and pleasure that would otherwise appear highly fortunate. I respond to objections based on masochism, pain asymbolia, analytic functionalism, the desire theory of pain and pleasure, the phenomenology of meditation, and more. I also outline the most important implications of the view within the metaphysics of causation and philosophy of mind. In the metaphysics of causation, it supports realism about causal powers in general, as well as a grounding-based version of the powerful qualities view of properties in particular. In philosophy of mind, it radically suggests that physicalism is false and panpsychism or panprotopsychism may be true.