Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts - Volume 1, Issue 2 – Pages 135-146

Two Dogmas of Reductionism:

On the Irreducibility of Self-Consciousness and
the Impossibility of Neurophilosophy

By Joseph Thompson
Two fundamental assumptions have become dogma in contemporary
Anglo-American philosophy of consciousness: that everything about
consciousness can be explained in physical terms, and that
neuroscience provides the uniquely authoritative methodology for
approaching the essential questions. But there has never yet been a
successful physical explanation of subjective first-person experience,
and reductionism fails to account adequately for thought, reason, and
a full range of objects proper to philosophy. Tracking the deep divide
within the analytic tradition, I bring a ‘continental’ (German)
perspective to bear on recent work from Nagel and Chalmers which
shows the reductionist neuroscientific agenda to be incapable of
completion, for systematic reasons. Physicalism can explain only
structure, function, and mechanism; but self-consciousness is always
already embodied and embedded in multiple contexts beyond the
structures and functions of brain activity. Consciousness needs to
account for itself, to itself, on the terms in which it experiences itself.
No explanation of the form provided by ‘neurophilosophy’ is adequate
to the most fundamental and essential phenomena of self-
consciousness, and neurophilosophy can never philosophically
explain or justify itself on its own terms and by its own methodology.
These are insuperable limitations for any explanation aspiring to be
comprehensive, and such problems have brought contemporary
antireductionists in the English-speaking world back around to
positions which strongly resemble the ontology and phenomenology of
German-language philosophers, particularly Kant, Hegel, and
Heidegger.

Two Dogmas of Reductionism

There is a deep division within contemporary analytic (Anglo-American)

philosophy of mind and consciousness, between reductionists and
antireductionists: those who think there are only physical problems to be
solved, and those who maintain that any physicalist explanation will be
fundamentally inadequate to a full account of consciousness and self-
consciousness. From the standpoint of German philosophy, I bring a


Associate Professor, University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA.

https://doi.org/10.30958/ajha.1-2-4 doi=10.30958/ajha.1-2-4
Vol. 1, No. 2 Thompson: Two Dogmas of Reductionism …

‘continental’ philosophical perspective to bear on this dispute, aiming to clarify

and sharpen recent developments, strongly supporting the antireductionist
position, and outlining a critique of what is called ‘neurophilosophy.’
In the philosophy of mind and across the neurosciences, consciousness
reductionism in its various forms has been the dominant approach for the past
three decades. Consciousness, like everything else, like all there is, is
ultimately to be explained in physical terms: ‘reductive materialism is widely
assumed to be the only serious possibility.’ The physicalist version of
reductionism presents, not arguments, but only ‘hope’: ‘the hope that
everything can be accounted for at the most basic level by the physical
sciences, extended to include biology’ (Nagel, 2012). In the neuroscientific
version of consciousness reductionism, the privileged level of description is
neurobiology and the cognitive sciences. Consciousness is to be accounted for
as neural activity, which is supposed to afford unique access in answering
questions in the philosophy of mind.
Whether in its physicalist or neuroscientific forms, reductionism has a
negative connotation, suggesting the dogmatic generalization that everything
there is can be reduced to purely material, physical terms—to molecules in
motion and nothing more. With respect to consciousness and self-
consciousness specifically, reductionism purports to explain these phenomena
entirely in terms of the physical processes, structures and functions of the
brain: the neuroscientific replacement of the concept of ‘mind’ or ‘self’ by
neural activity and nothing more.
From the confident tone of such prominent figures as Dennett and
Churchland, one would get the impression that the reductionist agenda has
largely succeeded, and that the big questions of consciousness have been
essentially answered. Even if all the explanatory details have not yet been
worked out, we can be sure that they will be, and we can know in advance what
form those answers and explanations will take. The outdated problems,
approaches, and language of what used to be called ‘philosophy of mind’ are
being replaced by the methodology and corrected terminology of
neurophilosophy, the philosophical application of the empirical results of
neuroscience.
On the other side of the divide, however, for more than twenty years there
have been forceful arguments against reductionism, culminating in the most
recent works of Nagel and Chalmers, both from Oxford University Press: a
closely argued, nearly 600-page exhaustive account from Chalmers in 2010,
The Character of Consciousness, and a masterfully brief tour de force on Mind
and Cosmos from Nagel in 2012, with the provocative subtitle Why the
materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.
The critique leveled by Chalmers and Nagel shows the attempt to explain
consciousness in purely material, physical, or neuroscientific terms to be not
only incomplete but incapable in principle of completion. There are strong,
systematic reasons relating to the inherent limitations of physical explanation,
why any such account must fail to address what Chalmers (1997) has made
famous as ‘the hard problem of consciousness.’ For any assumption to the

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contrary, the burden of proof is now on the other side; but no compelling
counterarguments or rebuttals have been produced, and it seems doubtful
whether any could be.
We emphatically do not know that consciousness must be physical. That is
neither a law of logic nor an empirical fact. And indeed both sides recognize
that the subjective experience of self-consciousness has never yet actually been
captured by any physical, materialist reduction. No science has been capable of
‘explaining how and why consciousness arises from physical processes in the
brain’ (Chalmers, 1997). Indeed the phenomena most in need of explanation
cannot be addressed by any reductionist account, due both to the nature of
subjective experience, and to the nature of physicalist, reductionist explanation
itself. Despite general acceptance within the sciences and among many
scientifically minded philosophers, reductionism is neither self-evident nor
unproblematic. For Nagel it is highly doubtful: ‘I realize that such doubts will
strike many people as outrageous, but that is because almost everyone in our
secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research
program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science’
(2012).
Neurophilosophy and consciousness reductionism are thus predicated upon
two highly problematic assumptions: that everything (including the phenomena
of consciousness) can be explained in physical terms; and that neuroscience
provides the only reliable and accurate methodology for knowing things about
consciousness. Neither of these suppositions has ever been determined,
whether by scientific evidence or by philosophical argumentation. Numerous
objections stand against these assumptions. Lacking the requisite philosophical
justification, they may be identified (following Quine) as ‘two dogmas of
reductionism.’

Consciousness Not Explained

Faced with the task of explaining consciousness, as Dennett purports to do,

one of the most immediate and important issues obviously concerns the
explananda: what exactly needs to be explained and accounted for? This is a
fundamental question that directly informs the way the entire explanatory
process is undertaken, and how the question is answered will dictate what sort
of results are counted as successful explanations. In a work with the ambitious
title Consciousness Explained, Dennett (1991) assures us he will ‘explain the
various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how
they are all physical effects of the brain’s activities’—but he never does make
good on that claim. As he himself must admit:

Adopting materialism does not by itself dissolve the puzzles about

consciousness, nor do they fall to any straightforward inferences from
brain science. Somehow the brain must be the mind, but unless we can
come to see in some detail how this is possible, our materialism will

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not explain consciousness, but only promise to, some sweet day
(1991).

More than two decades later reductionists are still at the point of insisting
upon that ‘somehow,’ and still a long way off from that ‘some sweet day.’ For
a philosophical theory of consciousness it simply begs the question, to assert
that the only things to be explained are those functions and structures of the
brain amenable to neuroscience and physicalist reduction. Reductionism as a
philosophical presupposition remains a dogma: it starts from the controversial
assumption of materialist metaphysics, with everything that entails. Meanwhile
there is overwhelming phenomenological evidence to the contrary that must be
explained away in order for reductionism to work. Any adequate account of
consciousness must no doubt be informed and supplemented by a thorough
understanding of the physical mechanisms of the brain, but a physicalist
reduction would definitely be no substitute for a comprehensive philosophical
theory, not least because it would fail to address or justify its own fundamental
principles and presuppositions.
Ontological and epistemological assumptions about what kinds of things
exist and need to be explained cannot themselves be grounded by any appeal to
neuroscience: these claims fall within the domain of philosophy proper, and as
such they require philosophical argumentation. Chalmers (1997) notes that ‘to
establish this position—that there really is nothing else to explain—one might
think that extraordinarily strong arguments are needed.’ Yet the proponents of
this view have provided no such arguments: rather it has been taken as
uncontroversial, even axiomatic. But we cannot know a priori that the
philosophical explanation of consciousness will take the form of a physicalist
reduction, whether at the neurochemical or quantum level or otherwise, lacking
(as we do) the ‘extraordinarily strong arguments’ required for such a high-level
determination.
Not only has no such explanation been provided, but there can be none in
these physicalist and neuroscientific terms—none that actually accounts for the
phenomena in question, rather than sidestepping the real problem and dealing
with a different one instead, or denying that there is a problem at all.
Reductionism assumes that the only possible objects of knowledge about
consciousness are physical and brain-functional, and from this epistemological
presupposition draws the further and much stronger ontological conclusion,
that what is not explicable in terms of neuroscience and biology, chemistry and
physics, somehow does not exist or needs no explanation. That is not a
scientific truth, nor could it be established by any science, not even in
principle. The claim that scientifically derived empirical facts are all that we
can know about consciousness is not a scientifically derived empirical fact. As
Chalmers (1997) responds to his critics:

Proponents of the ‘no problem’ view sometimes like to suggest that

their view is supported by the results of modern science, but all the
science that I know is quite neutral here: I have never seen any

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experimental result that implies that functions are all that need to be
explained. Rather, this view seems to be rooted in a philosophical
claim…

The subject of first-person mental life-as experienced pre-philosophically,

given prior to any analysis-must be central among the default explananda in the
philosophy of consciousness, until and unless it is proven (as it never yet has
been) that the subjective selfhood we experience is in fact an illusion.
Otherwise that remains an extremely counterintuitive (perhaps even
incoherent) position, directly contradicted by immediate evidence, to which
one is driven only because the assumptions of physicalism require such a
denial. For the antireductionists, far more plausibly and practicably, ‘conscious
subjects and their mental lives are inescapable components of reality not
describable by the physical sciences.’ These realities cannot be avoided or
dismissed by any account of consciousness that aspires to be anything close to
comprehensive: conscious minds ‘are among the data that a theory of the world
and our place in it has to explain’ (Nagel, 2012).

Accounting for the Nonphysical

It has long been argued in at least one main line of Western philosophy—
and in numerous nonwestern traditions—that not everything which has reality
and significance is physical. From Pythagoras and Plato to Descartes and Kant,
the rationalist tradition has always had powerful arguments for the existence
and reality of the nonphysical. Still, the intractable problems of mind-body
interaction have led empirically oriented philosophers to try to avoid dualism at
all costs (Dennett, 1991). But it does come at a cost: anything apparently not
physical must be epiphenomenal, essentially denied reality. This encompasses
all evidently nonphysical features of self-consciousness, subjective experience,
thought, rationality, language, ‘the mind’ itself. It is no coincidence that Plato
and Descartes are among the least reputable in contemporary neurophilosophy.
But reductionists remain confronted with obvious problems of ontological
plurality, even if dualistic minds do not exist but only brains. Reductionism is
already incapable of accounting for the indisputable actuality of mathematics
and logic: both are clearly related to the physical, but also retain their formal
relations and truth apart from and independent of particular concrete physical
expressions or examples. Math and logic have objects which appear to be
distinctly nonphysical, nonmaterial, and to have a pronounced universal
character: they go beyond the physical, and thereby call into question the
explanatory range and power of any physicalist reduction. There is an
unreconciled dualism, a priori, at the heart of any supposed materialist
monism.
Reason itself is another central philosophical concern, related to math and
logic, which does not appear to be physically reducible, but which is obviously
operative and capable of generating truth and knowledge of all kinds, some

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‘pure’ (in Kant’s sense) and some ‘practical.’ Reason must be accounted for on
its own terms, for only with reason can we explain, correct, or answer
anything. Reason is its own ‘final court of appeal’; it has ‘completely general
validity, rather than merely local utility’ (Nagel, 2012). For ‘practical’
purposes we must be realists about reason: the rational is actual, and rational
relations obtain independently of any brain activity. Reason is one of a whole
broad set of realities that we experience and need to explain: Nagel (2012)
includes ‘consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose, thought, and value’
along with reason, as chief among the explananda incapable of physicalist
reduction, for which a higher-order level of ontological description is required.
If we add to that list other essential philosophical concerns like language,
art, religion, literature, history, culture, ethics, politics, justice—it becomes
more and more apparent that no scientific reduction is going to be able to
address and explain all these, and most certainly not a neuroscientific
reduction. But all these areas of inquiry are the rightful domain of philosophy:
they are part of the broad set of interconnected questions that define
philosophy, and they show just how limited neurophilosophy must be
considered in comparison with philosophy proper.
The empiricists have never been able to account for conceptual reality
empirically, not in any convincing way, because pure forms of reasoning and
inference are inherently abstract and a priori. The intelligible realities of
mathematics and logic cannot be denied actuality, yet whatever ‘being’ they
have must be other than physical. They may have physical instantiations, but
what is thereby instantiated is conceptual, universal, and any adequate
ontology must be able to explain the fundamental reality of reason, logic,
abstract concepts, universals. The very existence of logical necessity and the
fact that true propositions can be deduced from other propositions is itself
something that must be accounted for. Any and all empirical arguments must
presuppose a priori principles of reason, whose justification is not biological,
and which are not reducible to the terms of physics or any natural science. If
reason, math, and logic are nonphysical, then not everything is physical—so
then not everything can be explained in physical terms.
Math and logic present confounding ontological counterexamples, if not a
flat-out refutation of physicalist, materialist monism. They reveal the
insuperable limitations of reductionist explanation: dualism is already an
inescapable problem, before the even harder problem of subjective experience
and self-consciousness is factored in. If physical reductionism cannot account
ontologically for the abstract, nonphysical and universal truths and objects of
math and logic, a fortiori it cannot explain the forms of rational consciousness
which apprehend those truths and objects. So now there are at least three
fundamental ontological categories to account for: (1) the conceptual (e.g.
mathematics), no less than (2) the material/physical, and (3) self-
consciousness. It is striking how directly these categories recall the Hegelian
triad of Logic, Nature, and Mind [Geist]: we appear to have circled back
around at a deep level to German philosophy, as neo-Kantians, neo-Hegelians
and neo-Heideggerians.

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Consciousness, thought, reason, math and logic join what is a long list of
ontologically significant phenomena whose being cannot be explained or
accounted for in purely physicalist or materialist terms. Not only mathematical
and logical entities are nonphysical; so too are any abstract concepts, including
those of ethics and value: persons, rights, equality, dignity, fairness, justice,
‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’—these all go beyond the merely physical
substrate. This is not to say that they must be ‘supernatural,’ in the derogatory
or reproachful sense of the word. It means that they cannot be explained in
physical or neuroscientific terms: an expanded set of ontological categories and
an expanded conception of ‘nature’ are necessary to overcome the explanatory
gap. To adequately account for the phenomena of self-consciousness,
phenomenology is necessary: as Chalmers (1997) argues, phenomenological
approaches to the ‘hard problem’ must be ‘absolutely central to an adequate
science of consciousness: after all, it is our own phenomenology that provides
the data to be explained!’ Any Anglo-American attempt at explaining
consciousness must reckon with the critique already advanced by the German
philosophical tradition, concerning the foundations and general features of the
phenomenological approach: not only in Heidegger’s or in Husserl’s sense, but
primarily along the lines of Hegel, that original post-Kantian phenomenologist
of consciousness.

The Impossibility of Neurophilosophy

The neurophilosophical project was therefore bound to fall short, because

neuroscience cannot substitute for phenomenology or ontology: it cannot
address or explain entire areas of philosophical inquiry. No science has ever
scientifically established its own philosophical presuppositions: the sciences do
not empirically justify the logical, ontological, and epistemological
determinations which are the conditions for the possibility of science.
Of course the philosophy of nature has branched off over the centuries into
many sciences; but science has never been able to ‘replace’ philosophy, and
there is no reason to expect that neuroscience will fare any better. Philosophy
and science have a great deal in common, and there is a long and likely familiar
set of arguments for their similarity and affinity that need not be rehearsed
here. But there are also numerous points differentiating philosophy from
science, which show how and why they are not the same thing; science on its
own cannot establish philosophical conclusions any more than philosophy on
its own can establish scientific propositions. But philosophy, crucially—as
Kant and Hegel practice it, for example—can account for itself on its own
terms, while the sciences cannot.
From the overarching view pejoratively termed ‘scientism’—so called
because it dogmatically insists that the sciences can explain everything—we
can coin the term neuroscientism, to designate the dogmatic extension of
neuroscientific reductionism into other domains of philosophy, the attempt to
appropriate and reframe the ‘traditional’ problems of philosophy into questions

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that can be addressed by neuroscience. Neurophilosophy is meant to be a

science, as Churchland (1989) makes clear in her subtitle: ‘Toward a unified
science of the mind/brain.’ More recently, Churchland (2008) claims that
traditional philosophy of mind has been taken over and ‘replaced’ by
neuroscience:

Since the weight of evidence indicates that mental processes actually

are processes of the brain, Descartes’ problem has disappeared. The
classical mind/body problem has been replaced with a range of
questions: what brain mechanisms explain learning, decision making,
self-deception, and so on. The replacement for ‘the mind-body
problem’ is not a single problem; it is the vast research program of
cognitive neuroscience.

But ‘the really hard problem of consciousness,’ according to Chalmers

(1997), ‘is the problem of experience,’ and it has assuredly not ‘disappeared’:
‘any neurobiological or cognitive account will be incomplete, so something
more is needed for a solution to the hard problem.’ For Nagel (2012) ‘the
mind-body problem is not just a local problem’: far from having disappeared,
‘it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.’ The
implications are profound, and the explanatory task that much greater, when
the ‘really hard problem’ takes us from neurons out to ‘the entire cosmos and
its history.’
Few neuroscientists would presume to make pronouncements concerning
the cosmos. Neurophilosophy is not in a position to give a comprehensive
analysis of consciousness in its cosmological context, considering its full
implications. Even the object directly at hand remains a ‘really hard problem,’
an unsolved problem: showing how and why the mind is nothing more than
brain activity. But the ‘impossibility of neurophilosophy’ refers more broadly
to the inability of cognitive neuroscience to give an adequate account of
fundamental philosophical issues. It does not and could not address entire
branches of foundational questions on its own terms. Neuroscience cannot
provide a systematic and coherent integration. As a philosophical methodology
it is inapplicable and incapable outside its area; it certainly cannot presume to
provide an account of the totality. In these respects neurophilosophy is and
must remain limited and incomplete, due to inherent differences between
science and philosophy proper.
Scientists have many times tried to claim epistemic priority for science
over philosophy, but such claims are themselves philosophical and therefore
self-undermining. Science has always been closely related to philosophy, but it
has never been adequate to ‘replace’ it, for systematic reasons relating to the
kinds of empirical questions settled by the sciences: causal questions, physical,
material, functional questions. Their answers are framed as scientific
explanations or hypotheses. But those are not the forms of fundamental
philosophical questions and answers, a difference which is essential to both
philosophy and science. The normative claims of philosophy (including the

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priority given to scientific knowledge) are not like the empirical propositions
of the sciences themselves, and they are established in very different ways. The
broad categories of philosophy and science are as obviously distinct as they are
also in subtler ways similar. A scientific fact discovered e.g. by functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) does not answer a philosophical question;
and conversely if it is a philosophical question, then the answer is not
discoverable by laboratory experiments or fMRI scans. Among other things,
philosophy asks metaquestions: metaethical or metalogical or metaphysical
questions are not settled by fMRI or by describing how brain mechanisms
work.
Neurophilosophy therefore cannot be considered philosophy proper, but
only a branching off from some areas of inquiry in philosophy, while leaving
other entire areas completely open and untouched. Neurophilosophy provides
essentially no account, for example, of logic or ontology, and no ethics or
ethical theory that is not already question-begging. Its restricted range offers
explanations for only a subset of issues within the philosophy of consciousness.
The entire orientation and approach appears excessively ‘neurocentric’: overly
privileging the brain, yielding an ontologically incomplete set of phenomena as
compared to the full range of objects of philosophical investigation. It is
evident that fundamental questions, metaquestions which are properly
philosophical, could never be settled by an appeal to neuroscience or indeed
any science. There is no scientific method to ground, validate, or verify
metaethical determinations: rather such evaluative justification must be
borrowed from this or that philosophical theory.
Philosophy, on the other hand, encompasses activities in multiple contexts,
and deals with objects for which multiple levels of description are necessary
beyond the merely physical, material, or neurobiological. Philosophy requires
reasoning, argumentation, evaluation, analysis and synthesis, interpretation,
hermeneutics: it deals with broad concepts like meaning, value, significance. It
is concerned with social realities and abstract systems no less than the
biological, chemical and physical substrates of such higher-order structures.
Philosophical accounts have to make sense of phenomena which are social,
linguistic, cultural, political, experiential, aesthetic, evaluative, normative:
these are generally not delineable and determinable the way the objects of the
sciences are, and they are not explicable in the same terms. Scientific data may
be relevant to such analyses; but they can never be decisive or dispositive:
philosophy is larger than science, and comprehends it (in both senses of the
word). The objects of philosophy include higher levels and larger contexts, the
social structures, institutions, organized practices and collective functions—
including philosophy itself—which happen not just in brains but in ‘the
external world,’ with everything that entails.
In Heidegger’s terms, Dasein or ‘human being’ is always already being-in-
the-world (in-der-Welt-sein), the phenomenology of which requires
philosophical investigation and explanation: a full accounting and reflective
interpretation which provides for the ‘lifeworld’ within which human being
takes place, the multiple contexts larger than the given physical immediacies of

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brain activity. Philosophy can, where neurophilosophy cannot, address the

reality of complex, externalized, formal systems, structures, and narratives,
transcending individuals and encompassing not just ‘many brains’1—the
fallacy of composition—but going beyond brain activity altogether.

Back to Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger

I have taken note of some clear parallels between contemporary

antireductionist arguments and important positions maintained by Kant, Hegel,
and Heidegger. A more extensive treatment of this topic would bring out the
many detailed points of similarity connecting Nagel and Chalmers with their
predecessors in the German-language philosophical tradition, who also include
(among others) Leibniz, Schelling, Nietzsche, Husserl, and in his own way,
Wittgenstein.
Here at least a few of these parallels may be briefly drawn. In Hegel’s
analysis of explaining consciousness, for example—what may be his most
essential philosophical project—a diremptive yet self-reflexive relation obtains,
between the conscious object which is to be explained, and the conscious
subject which does the explaining: the same thing accounting for itself to itself.
We have to explain ourselves, as the knowing, experiencing beings who are
capable of explaining and accounting. Making intelligible one’s own being and
knowledge of oneself must be part of one’s general account of the world. We
are the being that does the explaining of being, including our own: we are the
irreducible consciousness that has come to understand itself as irreducible
consciousness. Knowing ourselves for what we are, the self-conscious subjects
as well as the objects of inquiry and knowledge, clearly suggests Hegel’s Mind
or Spirit, coming to know itself as Mind or Spirit—as ‘substance just as much
as subject.’ Nagel (2012) acknowledges his debt to Hegel and German
philosophy, sounding especially Hegelian when he writes (for example):

Mind … is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to

give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be
comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings
should be comprehensible to themselves.

The subjectivity implicit in self-consciousness and self-comprehension

requires the reality of reflexively self-aware persons, conscious selves, who
have first-person experience. Following Kant we could even call these the a
priori conditions for the possibility of explaining consciousness. Not only is
the subject contained a priori in any and all such explanations; so too is the

1
Note Churchland’s (2008) deformation of the language of metaethics and social theory into
terms of brain activity: ‘Solving social problems is an awesomely complex business, requiring
relevant facts, including facts about cultural practices, about what brains do value, and fact-
based predictions about consequences. Fundamentally, moral/social problems are constraint-
satisfaction problems at the many-brain level…’

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self-conscious rational community of inquirers, for which truth, knowledge,

scientific explanation itself are all real values. Only on such an assumption
does the entire explanatory enterprise make any sense. These are among the
phenomena of consciousness that need to be explained, to which no reduction
to brain activity could possibly be adequate.
German-language philosophers had long recognized and argued that
empirical research into psychology, anthropology, biology and the natural
sciences (necessary as it is) would never—could never—be sufficient for a
philosophically adequate account and comprehensive explanation of ‘mind,’
self-consciousness, thought, and reason. But philosophy in the English-
speaking world had to come around to these conclusions independently, that
the subject of first-person experience is ‘transcendental’ in Kant’s sense—that
self-consciousness is ontologically irreducible, that it is no epiphenomenon but
fundamental to the nature of the universe. The results, as Chalmers (2010)
writes, are ‘liberating’:

This I take to be precisely the liberating force of taking consciousness

as fundamental. We no longer need to bash our heads against the wall
trying to reduce consciousness to something it is not. Instead we can
engage in the search for a constructive explanatory theory … which
accommodates consciousness in the natural world. And a fundamental
theory of consciousness … is the best way to do just that.

Assigning consciousness its proper place as fundamental, the

consequences are profound: we have to expand our ontology and become
realists about a broad range of possible objects, not all of which are physical.
This will require a substantial revision to our entire conception of the universe:
if consciousness is real, then materialism as the whole truth is ‘almost certainly
false.’ Just as with Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, reason, ontology,
phenomenology, and social theory are all advanced again as central and
necessary, as ineliminable in the project of explaining and accounting
adequately for consciousness. These long-held ‘continental’ positions may now
be said to have been vindicated from within the analytic philosophical tradition
itself.

Bibliography

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Chalmers, D. (2010). The character of consciousness. New York: Oxford University
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