Category Archives: Arguments from Mindmelding

Mindmelding: The First Cut

When approaching the mind-body problem (it will become clear below why I call it this and not “the problem of consciousness”), it is crucial to make the first division into sub-problems correctly. Otherwise, you analysis will not be able to recover from the error.

I believe the correct first cut is into two sub-problems:

1. The problem of consciousness.

2. The inside/outside problem.

The problem of consciousness is the question of how our conscious states are unified across several different brain areas.

The inside/outside problem is the question of why our conscious states appear differently to us, the owners of a brain, from the way they appear to outside observers.

[More coming.]