Mihai Alexandru Bîclea

Scientists have attempted to find consciousness and, more specifically, qualia in the physical world ever since philosophers such as Thomas Nagel (1974) or Frank Jackson (1986) have commented upon the elusive experiential properties of such mental states that are characterized by a specific “what’s it like”. One of the proposals to minimize the metaphysical and epistemological tension that arises once the existence of such phenomena is acknowledged originates in the influential paper “What is it like to be a bat?” (Nagel, 1974): the development of an objective phenomenology. Current research programmes follow this idea and aim to understand consciousness using mathematical-empirical models. However, these endeavors seem to be missing the point when studying consciousness because they do not provide any evidence about how qualia correspond to neural states. I argue against a proposal to account for the missing link between physical structures and qualia, namely the use of category theory (Tsuchiya et al., 2016). Instead, I conjecture that the endeavor is futile because it relies on the assumption that qualia can be described structurally from an epistemological point of view. I support my conjecture arguing that phenomenal holism has not been ruled out.

Thomas Nagel’s end note of his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?” introduced the speculative proposal of developing an objective phenomenology capable of enabling further empirical studies of consciousness. I will argue that such an endeavor inevitably faces two major difficulties in the first-order inaccessible qualia and second-order inaccessible qualia. The latter essentially comprise all of our qualitative contents associated with our experiences, as all qualia are private or inaccessible by other agents who do not share the same point of view, while the former should be seen as a subgroup of phenomenal contents that are temporarily or permanently unconscious or, more explicitly, unavailable to the agent to whom they belong to.