Ranadhir Mukhopadhyay

We view the mind-body problem in terms of the two interconnected problems of phenomenal consciousness and mental causation, namely, how subjective conscious experience can arise from physical neurological processes and how conscious mental states can causally act upon the physical world. In order to address these problems, I develop here a non-physicalist framework that combines two apparently antithetical views: the materialist view of the mind as a product of the brain and the metaphysical view of consciousness rooted in an underlying hidden reality. I discuss how this framework resolves the problem of mental causation while being simultaneously consistent with fundamental physical principles. I will elucidate how the framework ties in to the perspective of 'meaning' that acts as the bridge between physical neurological processes and the conscious mind. Moreover, we will see how both our awareness of the self and our representation of the external world are connected to this perspective.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, we need to probe deeply into the nature of physical reality. This leads us to quantum physics and to a second explanatory gap: that between quantum and classical reality. I will seek a philosophical framework that can address these two gaps simultaneously. Our analysis of quantum mechanics will naturally lead us to the notion of a hidden reality and to the postulate that consciousness is an integral component of this reality. The framework proposed in the paper provides the philosophical underpinnings for a theory of consciousness while satisfactorily resolving the interpretation problem in quantum mechanics without the need to alter its mathematical structure. I also discuss some implications for a scientific theory of consciousness.