For whatever reasons consciousness fascinates me but also always confuses me. That makes me frustrated. An expert commenting here suggested I read some Susan Blackmore. I got her 2017 2nd ed. book, Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction[1] and came across what is the best clarifying, frustration-reducing explanation I've encountered so far.
Blackmore wrote this about subjective feelings of pain, which are mediated by C-fibers in the body which send impulses to the spinal cord which sends impulses that wind up triggering neural activity in several parts of the brain:
"Which is the case with pain? Maybe the physical changes cause the pain in which case we have the hard problem. Maybe the pain causes the physical changes, in which case we need a supernatural theory. Maybe something else causes both, but we have no idea what. Or maybe they really are the same thing. Many materialists argue for this last explanation, but if this was true we have absolutely no idea of how it could be true. How could pain actually be the firing of my C-fibers?"
My translation into simpler language:
When we talk about pain, there are several possibilities.
The physical processes in the body such as nerve firing or brain activity cause the feeling of pain. But if that's the case, we face the "hard problem of consciousness", namely why and how those physical processes give rise to any subjective experience at all. The hard problem of consciousness is how to explain why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to any subjective experience. Why is there "something it is like" to feel pain, see red, or taste coffee? Even if we fully understand the brain's mechanisms and functions, the hard problem asks why those mechanisms are accompanied by conscious feeling rather than functioning in the dark with no subjective experience, like a zombie.
Alternatively, maybe the conscious feeling of pain causes physical changes in the body or brain. That view implies that subjective experience can independently influence the physical world. That requires a kind of non-physical or supernatural explanation, typically some form of "dualism" where the material brain is one thing and consciousness is different and immaterial.
A third possibility is that some unknown underlying factor causes both the physical changes and the subjective sensation. Currently we have no idea what such a factor might be. Also a form of dualism.
The fourth possibility as many materialist believers claim, is that the physical and the experiential or subjective feelings are not two different things at all. Instead, pain is identical to the firing of C-fibers and associated brain activity. But if that's true, we don't have a plausible explanation of how identity between a subjective feeling and a physical process could work or exist. We don't know how the qualitative sensation of hurting could literally be a pattern of nerve firings. As far as we think we know, we are not zombies.
Better understanding seems to be slowly dawning. Hope springs eternal.
😊
Footnote:
1. This short book is in Oxford's Very Short Introduction series of books written by experts in their fields. The books are not high-level academia, but also not high school. They seem to be targeted at undergraduates in college or university. So far, there's about 820 of these excellent little books, with the list at this link.
The home page
Part of the 1st page of the
list of short intro books
I plan to get Moral Responsibility
when it comes out in Nov. 2026 --
morality is another endlessly fascinating topic --
morality is at the heart of pragmatic rationalism,
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