"Not only is this assumption of privacy ubiquitous in Euro-American philosophy in the form of the view that we have privileged access to our own mental states (e.g. Locke 1688/1959; James 1890/1950; Heil 1988), but it is also at the root of one of contemporary philosophy's most famous and pressing problems- the hard problem of consciousness: the problem of how consciousness arises from physical matter."
"The hard problem assumes that there is a subjective and private feeling to conscious experience that differentiates it from physical processes: there is something it is like to be in a conscious state of looking at a red flower, which a different subjective consciousness cannot know, whereas physical processes can be known objectively and third-personally ( Chalmers 1996; Chalmers 2016; Jackson 1986; Lee 2024; Nagel 1974)."
A single external object, such as a red flower, can elicit distinct first-person experiences that include sensory qualities, memories, and emotions unique to each individual. Those first-personal experiences are unavailable to other persons and cannot be experienced exactly as felt by someone else. Many Euro-American philosophical traditions treat first-person perspective as privileged access to one's own mental states. That privacy assumption underlies the hard problem of consciousness, which separates subjective qualitative feeling from objective physical processes. Utpaladeva, a tenth-century Kashmiri Śaivism philosopher, denies the privacy assumption and articulates an idealist worldview centered on a universal consciousness named Śiva.
Read at Apaonline
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]