II. Objections to Biological Naturalism from the Point of View of the Philosophical Tradition

If you find this account of consciousness so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, you are already a healthy biological naturalist and can probably stop reading now. However, though I think biological naturalism is contemporary scientific common sense, it is routinely challenged by those who accept some or all of the grand philosophical tradition of discussing the mind/body problem, and I now need to address the elements of that tradition that make it difficult to understand biological naturalism.

The tradition that blinds us to these facts is vast and deeply embedded in our culture, both our popular culture and our academic philosophy. I cannot expose and answer all of it, but I will try to pick some of the central points. My strategy will be to make a series of objections to biological naturalism, and then show how they can be answered once we abandon certain false elements of the tradition.

Objection 1. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot claim that consciousness is an ordinary biological process and thus have a materialist account of consciousness, but at the same time claim that it is irreducibly subjective, which gives you a dualist account of consciousness. You have to be either a materialist or a dualist—you cannot pretend to avoid both or to be both.

Answer to Objection 1. Objection 1 rests on a mistaken conception of the implications of the real distinction between mental and physical. The traditional assumption is that mind and body, as ordinary understood, name mutually exclusivemetaphysical categories. If something is mental then it cannot in that very respect be physical. If it is physical it cannot in that very respect be mental. This is the deepest mistake and it is shared by both materialists and dualists. Dualists think once you respect the reality and irreducibility of consciousness you are forced to dualism, materialists think once you accept a scientific naturalistic conception of the universe you are forced to deny the reality and irreducibility of consciousness. They are both trying to say something true but they end up saying something false. There is nothing for it but to expose the falsehood and rescue the truth. If we leave out some special problems about unconscious mental states, we can articulate the traditional picture in the following chart:

On the traditional conception if anything is mental it has the left hand features, if physical, the right hand features.

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