David J. Chalmers [[An overview of "first-person" and "third-person" issues about consciousness, w ritten when I was a first-year graduate student at Indiana in 1989. This was Part I of a supposedly 3-part paper - the two remai ning parts got turned into "Consciousness and Cognition". This part doesn't reach any firm conclusions, but it captures someth ing of the eternal internal struggle.]] Organization, roughly. Intro to what "first-person" and "third-person" mean. (outline the probs of the first person) (convenience of third-person vs absoluteness of first-person) (explain terminology) Dominance of third-person, reasons. (embarassment with first person) (division of reactions) (natural selection - those who can make the most noise) (analogy with behaviourism) Reductionism, hard-line and soft-line Appropriation of first-person terms by reductionists. (mind, consciousness, first-person) (correspondence of first-person to third-person) The problems of the first person (problem of qualia, problem of mental content) The cult of the first person The reconciliation - what the third person can tell us about the first person We CAN'T separate the first-person from the third-person. Even as I write this, it's my brain that is doing the thinking. The First Person and the Third Person Perhaps the most important duality in the philosophy of mind is that between the first-person and thirdperson views of mental events. Some might say that the fundamental duality is th at between mind and brain, or between subjective and objective - but all of these reduce to the firs t-person/third-person duality. The first person is, at least to many of us, still a huge mystery. The famous "M ind-Body Problem," in these enlightened materialist days, reduces to nothing but the question "What is the f irst person, and how is it possible?". There are many aspects to the first-person mystery. The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person . Such phenomena include some famous philosophical bugbears: subjective experience, qualia, consc iousness, and even mental content (although see below. It is notoriously difficult to even talk abo ut the first person without slipping into confusion, and these terms may have different connotations for dif ferent people.). The distinguishing mark of the first-person view is the air of mystery which sur rounds it. This feeling of mysteriousness has led many people to dismiss the first-person out of hand. It p erhaps has 'spiritual' connotations not unlike those of the occult or religion. But the first-person is not to be dismissed so easily. It is indeed a glaring anomaly today, in the heyday of the scientific world-view . If it was not for the direct
experience which all of us have of the first-person, it would seem a ridiculous
concept. But it throws up too many problems to be neatly packaged away in the kind of third-person explana tion which suffices for everything else in the scientific world. Pity. The third-person view, by contrast, poses no deep metaphysical difficulties. The difficulties here, while not