The Epistemic Approach to the Mind-Body Problem. Daniel Stoljar

This lecture professor Stoljar gave at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University at the invitation of our Center for Consciousness Studies. “In a number of books and papers over the last 15 years or so, I have defended what I call an “epistemic approach” to the mind-body problem. This approach has two parts. The first part is a hypothesis about our current epistemic situation, namely, that we are ignorant of certain features of the physical world that are relevant to consciousness. The second part argues that, if this hypothesis is true, the crucial lines of reasoning in the mind-body problem—I have in mind reasoning about zombies, Mary, the inverted spectrum and the rest—are unpersuasive. This talk sets out in elementary terms the version of the epistemic approach I think is most plausible. I will be particularly concerned with two questions about it: how it differs from various other approaches to the mind-body problem, such as dualism and illusionism; and whether it is a genuine response to the problem in the first place, rather than merely a way we might live with ourselves in absence of any solution.“