Abstract

Open peer commentary on the article “The Tangled Dialectic of Body and Consciousness: A Metaphysical Counterpart of Radical Neurophenomenology” by Michel Bitbol. Abstract: While sympathetic to the view that lived experience is prior, epistemologically, at least, to any conclusions we draw about an apparent external world, I argue that to deny that the ontological shift proposed in the target article leaves us with a hard problem is problematic. The worry is that retaining an ontology in which physical bodies and conscious experience co-exist and interact leaves us with the question of how there ever came to be conscious beings capable of constructing a subjective view of a physical external world. One possible response would be to endorse panpsychism, but this option is rejected. I propose an alternative approach: panabstractism, which is the view that what there is consists of concrete matter and abstract relations, with each constituting the other, a distinction that is orthogonal to the traditional mind/body dichotomy.

Citation

Pierce B. (2021) Can panabstractism offer an alternative approach to the hard problem? Constructivist Foundations 16(2): 161–163. https://constructivist.info/16/2/161

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