Letter from Robert K.
Colin:
I love the piece. I took the liberty of appending a healthy portion of it to your Landscape entry, lengthening what was already the longest entry. I think it is important to stress your position, particularly your current way of thinking, because your “mysterianism” is a core contribution to the M-B Problem, and it has been misconstrued by some who don’t understand and misapplied by others who have an agenda.
As always, any and all edits welcome.
Warm regards,
Robert
Great, Robert. You really do understand it. I don’t know why others don’t—I suspect they just don’t want to.
Have you ever wondered how Chalmers ever got anywhere? He has nothing original to say and keeps saying it.
Colin
On Jul 18, 2026, at 6:09 AM, Colin <cmg124@aol.com> wrote:<Problems of Consciousness.docx>
If one rejects the mysterian thesis, how does one understand the nature of philosophical problems? It seems extravagant to think that the problems that puzzle human minds and seem to elude final resolution by those minds would similarly puzzle and prove recalcitrant to any species of rational mind. Any alternative to a mysterian definition of philosophical problems seems highly implausible: just what is a philosophical problem if it is not constituted by a mismatch between our contingent cognitive limitations as a species and aspects of the world that we want to understand?
It is quite true, I think, that mysterianism is the least implausible explanation of the existence and nature of philosophy. It makes sense of philosophy as a subject. When I wrote Problems in Philosophy I had a final chapter comparing my meta-philosophy with other meta-philosophies and arguing that it is superior, but I decided not to include it. I probably should have.
I don’t buy all this “mysterianism” stuff. I love mysteries, but I can do without the defeatism. It seems to be based on the current understanding of the problems, which is probably wrong. Chomsky is a mysterian about the phenomenon people call “meaning” (without ever being able to refer to it), but I reject his defeatism about it, which seems to depend on a lack of imagination. Inquiry is open-ended; answers are not guaranteed. Go ahead and attack me for this, but the thoughts you present here on the difficult philosophical problems still have value and interest, prior to the throwing up of the hands. I don’t think I need to accept that last part to find the prior part valuable. (Smile emojis)
I don’t recall Chomsky being a mysterian about meaning, but he is about free will. He seems more of an eliminativist about meaning, as he is also about the self. I won’t bother to attack you, as you put it, but I wonder if you have asked yourself some relevant questions. Do you think we humans will ever grasp the nature of bat experience? Do you think blind people will ever know color as sighted people do? Do you think we will ever know how many dinosaurs there were? Do you think we will ever run a mile in 10 seconds? Do you think with enough effort dogs will ever understand logarithms? Etc.
I can answer “no” to all those questions, although if the last one had been about cats, I would have had to hesitate. As for the mile, it was reported that during his world record run of 3:42.6 Josh Kerr lost his sense of hearing, which seems to indicate he was nearing some kind of limit.
So, you think there are principled limits to human knowledge. Have you ever read any of my discussions of mysteries?
I certainly would not say there are no principled limits to human knowledge. But, for example, in a previous post I cited approvingly a sentence you wrote: “It [what’s puzzling about not being able to understand consciousness] seems to have something to do with our means of acquiring knowledge of empirical reality,”. I liked it because it seems to leave open the possibility of identifying what it is that’s puzzling about not being able to understand consciousness as having something to do with our means of acquiring knowledge of empirical reality. Identifying just what this something is would seem to be a pursuable question. The problem is that we have found it difficult to describe thought using language, for example, a significant component of what people understand as “consciousness”, and a significant tool for understanding empirical reality, as an object belonging to “empirical reality”. I don’t think people have successfully done it, but I don’t think it’s impossible to do it. (I’m not talking about how the organization and activity of neurons supports all of this logical reality; it looks like we’re a long way from understanding that and I don’t see a path, but I wouldn’t want to just close off future inquiry.)
I’m sorry I have not yet read your writings outside of this blog, or all the posts here, but if you could point me to, e.g., some pertinent posts, I should be grateful. I have a project I’m trying to make progress on that involves a lot of my time at the moment. But I find these exchanges useful.
You could start with my book Problems in Philosophy.