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Essay on Paul Churchland and Thomas Nagel
The philosophers of mind Paul Churchland and Thomas Nagel have argued that these phenomena show the concept of consciousness to lack scientific respectability. Their argument, roughly, is that any meaningful distinction between an element's being conscious and its being unconscious is undermined by the ability of those phenomena we call unconscious to affect behavior just as conscious phenomena do.
To varying degrees Thomas Nagel and Paul Churchland accept that there is a profound difference in kind between the things explained in our functional theories and our phenomenal experience. From the perspective of these philosophers, although we have theories of how people learn, how they perceive, how they use and understand language, we have little or no insight into why it is that people feel—why the universe has anything like feeling at all.
The progress of the sciences of mind have nothing to say about the existence of phenomenal experience, and so the questions about such experience become more and more compelling: why is not human life just brute mechanical processes, the way that many of us think a landslide or a planet's orbit is? Does not the scientific worldview make it perfectly possible that human life could be like this? Giving a solution to the hard problem amounts to offering some kind of account of why there should be experience at all.
After all, psychologists have always been concerned with consciousness, and they have made great strides in understanding it. Why claim it is a mystery impervious to science? Anyone who feels this way can be placed on the other side of the divide.
Thomas Nagel makes a distinction between motivated and unmotivated desires. The latter include things like hunger; the former are those desires, which we arrive at after deliberation. However, it is unclear whether motivated desires are actual (for example, physically measurable and distinct)................
