C

Why there is no 'hard' problem of consciousness

The 'common' sense is the one that most 'normal' (= non-philosophers) share, and use to process their everyday world. Importantly, they use this 'common' sense to understand behavioural causes (emotions) and behavioural effects (situations). To such folk, there is no problem of consciousness, hard or soft. People (and almost certainly our pets) are conscious whenever we are awake and getting stuff done.

When we use 'conscious' in this way, the everyday way, we understand that we are conscious of both internal, embodied states (usually called intentions or emotions) and external, predicated states (usually called predicaments or situations). The former states are roughly indicative of our embodied needs, often metabolic in nature, while the latter states are roughly indicative of the situated resources capable of satisfying those needs, either individually, or in concert.

Put this way, conscious states are used by us to 'join the dots', ie to plan, then execute behaviours that we believe are able to link up our current requirements to available resources. We voluntarily construct these behaviours from involuntary building blocks, which are groups of automatically triggered and choreographed reflexes. The problem is, how do we get volition (a feedforward emotional command) to cause each behavioural step, given that each stage in the chain of commands involves multiple interconnected reflexes (characteristic arrays of stimuli and their learned, or instinctive responses).

The answer is that each conscious cause (a singly directed, uniquely focussed emotional state) must cause just one conscious effect, for it to link up with all the others in the sequence of memories linking past experiences of that emotional need with past occurrences of the situation which satisfies it.

The conscious embodied states are called 'emotions' or 'feelings' while the conscious situated states are called 'perceptions'. Note that emotions and perceptions contribute differentially to the substructure of the conscious state.Their joint effect is to generate a semantic differential or focal gradient between background context ('awareness') and foreground content ('attention'). Awareness and attention in turn correlate with the 'what' and 'where' dual factor model of perception used to provide the neuroanatomic explanation for 'blindsight'.