Two Dogmas of Reductionism: On the Irreducibility of Self-Consciousness and the Impossibility of Neurophilosophy

Physicalism and neuroscience cannot provide a complete explanation of consciousness because they only address structure, function, and mechanism, not subjective first-person experience. Self-consciousness is embodied and embedded in contexts beyond brain activity. Contemporary antireductionist philosophers like Nagel and Chalmers, when pushed to their logical conclusions, arrive at positions that resemble the ontology and phenomenology of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. The reductionist neuroscientific agenda is incapable of completion for systematic reasons, and neurophilosophy cannot justify itself on its own terms.

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Abstract

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.