Eliminating P-Consciousness

My Philosophy of Mind professor is apparently in the midst of an eliminativist crisis in terms of phenomenal consciousness.  His argument is basically as follows:  1) There would be absolutely no difference between those individuals which actually have phenomenal consciousness and those individuals who labor under the false belief that they have phenomenal consciousness.  2) Phenomenal consciousness is far more metaphysically strange than is a false-phenomenal-consciousness-belief making mechanism in the brain.  3) Thus, the eliminative position is preferable to the alternative.

 

In order to make clear what he does and does not have in mind, consider how the eliminativist handles the case of Mary the color scientist.  When Mary is released from her colorless lab, she certainly does learn lots of new things, all of them false.  She didn’t learn about phenomenal consciousness in the lab because she only learned true things about conscious experience.  While I do not think that this really handles all the questions at hand, it must be admitted that this is a rather snappy reply.

 

Of course the most repulsive aspect of this position is idea of a biologically innate “false-belief maker” which is responsible for the fact that essentially all people labor under the delusion that they are NOT zombies.  I think we can do better than mere repulsion on this point, however; I think we can turn this into an actual objection.  If anything is supposed to characterize our phenomenal experience it is its rich, fine-grained nature.  The objection which I have to the eliminativist position described above is this: it seems extraordinarily unlikely that our false beliefs could possibly be fine-grained enough to account for all of our purported phenomenal experience.

 

The natural reply which I’m sure my professor would provide to this would be that he does not deny the fine-grained nature of access consciousness and it is access, rather than phenomenal consciousness which accounts for the fine grained nature of consciousness in general.  The problem with this response is that it is no longer clear what exactly it is that we are eliminating. 

 

After all, it is my position that there is nothing more to phenomenal consciousness than fine grained access consciousness.  In other words, it somebody is able to discern by way of access consciousness the all the features which constitute the experience of being burned by a stove, there is nothing leftover which is in need of explaining.  Put yet another way, phenomenal consciousness simply is fine-grain, largely automatic access consciousness and nothing more.

 

Given my professor’s hypothetical counter-reply, it is no longer clear wherein our positions differ all that much from each other aside from his positing a false-belief maker.  Notice, it is his denial of any kind of phenomenal consciousness which requires a false-belief maker.  On the other hand, it is my granting phenomenal consciousness by another name that makes such an innate false-belief maker superfluous.  Indeed, the real false-belief maker in this situation is not the biologically innate neural structure in humans, but rather the practice of philosophy.  It is only by utterly isolating phenomenal consciousness from access consciousness that we have any problem here at all.