What Makes Consciousness Mysterious?

What Makes Consciousness Mysterious?

Today it would be widely agreed that consciousness is mysterious, rather mysterious or extremely mysterious. It would not, however, be widely agreed what makes it mysterious—what precise characteristic confers the mystery. Some would say there is no mystery at all: consciousness is nothing but higher-order thought or self-ascription or not being asleep or activity in the reticular formation. I won’t discuss these views, as they strike most of us as non-starters. More promising, we have the ideas of intentionality, privacy, incorrigibility, and non-spatiality. These don’t seem inherently mysterious, however, though it may be that it is mysterious how the brain contrives to produce them. I don’t think many people look within, find these characteristics, and think, “Wow, that’s so mysterious!” So, granted that consciousness is mysterious, it is a bit of a mystery what makes it so—a mysterious mystery, as we might say. We can say what makes gravity a mystery, or dark matter, or the workings of black holes; but we find it difficult to identify the source of the felt mystery in the case of consciousness. It is certainly close at hand and not afraid to present itself, but it is obscure what makes it stand out as a mystery—how it differs from other natural phenomena in the mystery sweepstakes, particularly the brain.

Here is one popular answer: consciousness is subjective while other non-mysterious things are objective.[1] To be more specific, it has a peculiar epistemic property, viz. that it can only be known by beings that share its particular character. It is mysterious because it has this property (the brain doesn’t). We tacitly recognize that it is epistemically restricted in this way, so we deem it mysterious. It isn’t simply that it has the what-it’s-like property—why exactly is that a mystery? It’s that this property gives rise to the peculiar epistemic situation in which we find ourselves—knowing what it’s like to be human and not knowing what it’s like to be a bat. However, I don’t think this is plausible as an explanation of our sense of mystery with respect to consciousness. First, is this really how consciousness immediately strikes us when we sense its mystery? Isn’t it rather an ingenious (though correct) point about the epistemology of consciousness? The point might never have occurred to you (it takes some arguing for) even though you have a primitive sense of mystery about consciousness. It seems too surprising to be the explanation we are looking for. Second, what if we suffered from no such epistemic limitation—would we feel no mystery?  Suppose we happened to have a mechanism in our brain that reliably produced the knowledge in question (bats and all): would consciousness then seem devoid of mystery? Doubtful. Third, what if we developed an objective phenomenology that enabled us to comprehend any type of experience no matter how remote from our own? Again, would the sense of mystery then disappear? Would consciousness no longer seem like a thing set apart, a metaphysical oddity, a natural wonder? No, we don’t seem to have put our finger on what exactly gives rise to the feeling in question. Isn’t there something more intrinsic and irremediable about the mystery of consciousness? The epistemological point seems too extrinsic and contingent. So, the mystery of the mystery remains—we haven’t been able to specify what it is about consciousness that makes it so mysterious. And this is a problem, because then we are defenseless against the claim that there is really nothing mysterious going on—we have a false sense of mystery. We don’t understand what makes consciousness an especially intractable problem if we can’t say whence the impression of mystery arises. We might expect that answering this question will reveal something deep about consciousness and our conception of it. I will attempt to answer the question in the sequel.

[1] See Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?”