Consciousness and the fallacy of misplaced objectivity.

Objective correlates-behavioral, functional, and neural-provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance on these correlates should not lead to the 'fallacy of misplaced objectivity': the assumption that only objective properties should and can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically-its subjective properties-not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels would turn out to be magical rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory, we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do.

Not All Structure and Dynamics Are Equal.

The hard problem of consciousness has been a perennially vexing issue for the study of consciousness, particularly in giving a scientific and naturalized account of phenomenal experience. At the heart of the hard problem is an often-overlooked argument, which is at the core of the hard problem, and that is the structure and dynamics (S&D) argument. In this essay, I will argue that we have good reason to suspect that the S&D argument given by David Chalmers rests on a limited conception of S&D properties, what in this essay I'm calling extrinsic structure and dynamics. I argue that if we take recent insights from the complexity sciences and from recent developments in Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness, that we get a more nuanced picture of S&D, specifically, a class of properties I'm calling intrinsic structure and dynamics. This I think opens the door to a broader class of properties with which we might naturally and scientifically explain phenomenal experience, as well as the relationship between syntactic, semantic, and intrinsic notions of information. I argue that Chalmers' characterization of structure and dynamics in his S&D argument paints them with too broad a brush and fails to account for important nuances, especially when considering accounting for a system's intrinsic properties. Ultimately, my hope is to vindicate a certain species of explanation from the S&D argument, and by extension dissolve the hard problem of consciousness at its core, by showing that not all structure and dynamics are equal.