David Chalmers has distinguished the “hard” and the “easy” problem of consciousness, arguing that progress on the “easy problem”—on pinpointing the physical/neural correlates of consciousness—will not necessarily involve progress on the hard problem—on explaining why consciousness, in the first place, emerges from physical processing. Chalmers, however, was hopeful that refined theorizing would eventually yield philosophical progress. In particular, he argued that panpsychism might be a candidate account to solve the hard problem. Here, I provide a concise stock-take on both the (...) empirical-neuroscientific and philosophical-conceptual progress on consciousness. It turns out that, whereas empirical progress is indisputable, philosophical progress is much less pronounced. While Chalmers was right, I argue, in distinguishing distinctive types of problems of consciousness, his prediction of progress on the hard problem was overly optimistic. Empirical progress and philosophical progress are essentially uncoupled; a more skeptical perspective on progress in philosophy in general is appropriate. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for the value of participatory methodologies, in research with children, which aims to privilege their epistemologies and living experiences in relation to the nature of self. Researching self with children raises questions about the mainstream materialist paradigm which holds hegemony over most academic disciplines – and, importantly, over the life worlds of everyday people. Children’s experiences of self, others and the world challenge the dominant materialist paradigm, requiring investigation into other metaphysical models of reality, that (...) may have more explanatory power than materialism. I address this by appealing to a body of scholarship referred to as ‘postmaterialist’. Reauthoring our nature as human beings carries an increasing importance and urgency in the face of current ecological, economical and health crises. I argue that any research, which seeks to facilitate social transformation through everyday people, needs to begin by asking ontological questions about the nature of the self - the subject of experience who holds and reports epistemological authority over their subjective experiences. (shrink)

1 Non-reductive physicalists deny that there is any explanation of mentality in purely physical terms, but do not deny that the mental is entirely determined by and constituted out of underlying physical structures. There are important issues about the stability of such a view which teeters on the edge of explanatory reductionism on the one side and dualism on the other (see Kim 1998). 2 Save perhaps for eliminative materialism (see Churchland 1981 for a classic exposition). In fact, however, while.