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Romeo still loves Juliet. And although he thinks about her a lot, of course he also has feelings about her. That his feelings should be about her may by now be a little less puzzling. But what is it for him to have feelings? If intentionality remains a source of perplexity and controversy, so does consciousness.
Yet there is a significant difference between these components of the mind-body problem. In spite of disputes over which is the best approach to the naturalization of intentionality, it is widely agreed that the approaches examined in Chapter 7 help to demystify it. With consciousness the situation is different. The question of what it takes for there to be “something it is like” to have perceptual and other experiences still resists that sort of illumination. You may well be inclined to agree with Thomas Nagel's remark that with consciousness, the mind-body problem “seems hopeless”. You might even be tempted by what is sometimes called “mysterianism”: the view that the hard-wiring of human brains makes us forever incapable of understanding the solution to the mind-body problem (Colin McGinn 1991). A related but less pessimistic view is that the mind-body problem will not be solved until we have worked out a whole new science (Nagel 1998).
In this chapter we will look at the main accounts of consciousness current today. Some are varieties of functionalism or even behaviourism.
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