Title: The Problem of Consciousness
Author: McGinn, Colin
Published by: Blackwell
Year: 2004
First published: Blackwell, 1991
Date reviewed: 01.08
ISBN: 0-631-18803-7

I’ve decided there are two Colin McGinns. The first – call him M₁ – writes clear, lucid, witty reviews of philosophical books and papers for non-specialist readers. A good example is “Minds and Bodies”, Oxford 1997, ISBN 0-19-511355-1, reading which led me to “The Problem of Consciousness”. The second (M₂) writes obscure, dense, highly technical material for a readership of his peers, and is the author of this book. I’ll come clean: I didn’t understand most of it.

Which is ironic in a way because McGinn argues that there are limits to human understanding, or to put it another way, that our brains are physically incapable of solving certain problems. He calls this “cognitive closure”. This is not so hard to grasp: we accept that other brains (cats, bats) are built in a way which, try as we and they might, will never allow them to play chess. This book is a collection of papers in which McGinn develops his argument that the mind-body problem – the problem of understanding how a physical entity like a brain can produce the range of mental states we call consciousness – is permanently closed to human reason.

This is not to say that McGinn believes we must resort to the supernatural to explain consciousness. It is not god-given. We are right, he says, to call it a mystery, but he argues that there is a perfectly natural explanation of the mystery – it’s just that we can never reach that explanation or solve the mystery.

And now I’ve reached the limits of my own understanding, at least for the time being. I think McGinn believes not only that his position explains our failure, despite the best efforts of philosophers, to account for consciousness, but that our failure is inevitable. But if I’m right, I don’t understand how he reaches that more extreme conclusion. It must be there in the book, but the language is just too technical for me. I thought I understood what was meant by “mental state”, but now I think I probably don’t, at least in M₂‘s terms. Nor do I really know what he means by things like intentionality or perceptual content. Cognitively closed as I am, I’ll have to leave it there.

Still, never mind. I’ve been given Nagel’s “A View from Nowhere” for Christmas. M₂ discusses Nagel’s ideas at some length: maybe I’ll do better with him, and maybe then I’ll be able to come back and find a natural and non-mysterious explanation of “The Problem of Consciousness”.