Preternaturalistic mysterianism about consciousness adequately debunked.

Mysterians about consciousness of a certain stripe say consciousness is ineffable to science and inexplicable. In this article I argue that it isn't necessarily so, and provide good reasons why not.

The Mysterian View of Consciousness

The nature of consciousness is, understandably, important to people. In a very real sense, it is everything that we are. It’s the only apparently undeniable fact that we each have. Rationalist philosopher Rene Descartes’ famous statement of what philosophers call ‘the cogito’ – from “cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am” – is perhaps the best known philosophical idea that embodies the notion of consciousness.

Consciousness is our immediate, subjective awareness of our thinking and being: of our existence and behaviour as thinking beings. However, it seems very odd to most of us that consciousness can happen at all in a world made up of physical stuff like biological systems and brain cells. A lot of philosophers and non-philosophers think that consciousness is very mysterious. It does not seem to make sense that it is realised by the physical stuff that comprises us and our brains. For many people there is something immutably mysterious and mystical about consciousness. Science could surely never explain something so strange and astonishing.

For those people - science could surely never explain something so subjectively, fundamentally, and intimately important that has such intrinsic value for our humanity and identity. Scientism is – a-priori - surely not the right approach to use when trying to understand consciousness, they say. These folk need mysticism about consciousness to prevail. Unsurprisingly, philosophy refers to this group of people as mysterians about consciousness (Carruthers, 2000; Işikgil, 2022; Kriegel, 2003; Prinz, 2003).

It is uncontroversial to say that this view is often (but not always) intimately tied up with such people’s emotional and aesthetic preferences, and their beliefs about themselves and their existence, and their place and relevance in the universe. It is uncomfortable and even upsetting to such folk that their consciousness might not be very mysterious after all. The mysteriousness is, for them, necessary for human dignity, moral worth, and emotional security.

I am not one of those people. I am not a mysterian about consciousness. I do think it is astonishing that nature, evolutionary processes, and the physical universe managed to deliver something like consciousness. However, I don’t think that it necessarily follows that consciousness is an inexplicable mystery given the physical universe and evolutionary processes. Once we have the former (which we do), then it can be used to explain the latter. At the very least we can posit a good, scientifically based story about what is going on.