Does reality contain only physical things? Or could everything be conscious, as panpsychists claim? Philosopher Christian List argues it’s time to move beyond both sides of this debate. Consciousness reveals something far more radical: reality cannot be captured by a single, objective description. Dualists, panpsychists and materialists all assume that there’s one unified reality that science and philosophy can aim to describe. But the deep subjectivity of consciousness shows this can’t be right. Reality cannot be contained in a single book – only a whole library of perspectives will do.

Science has been hugely successful at explaining many phenomena, from the motion of the planets to the functioning of biological organisms. But despite advances in neuroscience, explaining how consciousness fits into the world remains elusive. Why do some organisms have experiences, feelings, subjective perceptions, and so on? The hallmark of consciousness is that there is something it is like to be a conscious subject, for that subject, as Thomas Nagel famously puts it. What makes some entities conscious, and others not, and how is consciousness related to the rest of the physical world? Even worse, there is no agreement on what would count as a good answer.

The big challenge of explaining consciousness stems from the fact that consciousness is inherently first-personal: something experienced only from a first-person perspective. Ordinary science, by contrast, is entirely third-personal. This point is widely appreciated, but its ramifications for our scientific worldview are more radical than commonly recognized. My claim is that, to capture what is special about consciousness, we must accept that there are genuinely first-personal facts, over and above the third-personal facts that ordinary science recognizes.

David Chalmers distinguishes between the “easy” and the “hard” problems of consciousness. The “easy problems” are to explain the cognitive and behavioural functions related to consciousness and to figure out which brain processes underpin them. Examples of such functions are the difference between wakefulness and sleep, and the ability to respond to perceptual stimuli. These problems are “easy,” insofar as they can be approached using ordinary scientific methods. For example, scientists can use behavioural and verbal responses as external markers of consciousness and correlate these with other observable data, including data from brain scans and physiology. However, even if neuroscience will ultimately tell us which patterns of brain activity are associated with which cognitive functions, this leaves unanswered a more fundamental question: why are there conscious experiences at all? Why do certain physical processes in the brain and body give rise to subjective experiences? Why don’t these processes take place “in the dark,” without anyone having any experiences, just as the planets revolve around the sun without the solar system experiencing anything? Answering these questions is the “hard” problem. What makes it hard is that the thing to be explained, subjective experience, is first-personal, while ordinary science offers only third-personal explanations.

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None of the physical and behavioural markers of consciousness that scientists study get to the heart of what consciousness is.

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