If you enjoy this essay, please consider subscribing to my newsletter [click here] for announcements, new essays, and podcast episodes straight into your inbox.

Yesterday, the philosopher Richard Yetter Chappell offered a thoughtful reply (see here) to my melancholic reflections on panpsychism, materialism, and the state of philosophy. Unlike me, Dan Dennett, or—I suspect—most scientists studying the brain, Richard maintains that science is:

i) neutral between the view that consciousness is (to simplify) identical to parts of your brain and what goes on inside of it, and the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, found in all particles of matter (or, for that matter, other theories such as dualism and idealism)

and

ii) to be sharply distinguished from philosophy.

Clearly, philosophers in their discussions on philosophical questions can hold radically different views on the meta-philosophical question of what philosophy is. Too often, philosophers argue about their alternative theories without getting into the meta-philosophical question of what makes one theory better than another. Perhaps more surprisingly, philosophers can have substantial agreement on first-order issues (I agree with much of Richard's excellent blog posts on ethical questions), while having fundamentally different views about second-order questions (my meta-ethical views on the nature of morality are radically different from those of Richard). So let me use this exchange as an opportunity to step back and reflect on the raison d'être of philosophy.

When I characterize the scientific study of consciousness as........

© Psychology Today