Friday, 1st Dec 2023, 14.00-15.30: “A Buddhist Physicalist Dissolution of the ‘Hard Problem’?”
Physicalists claim that all the facts about the mind and its states can in principle be explained in purely
physical (including neurophysiological) terms. The alleged difficulty known as the hard problem is that
it seems one could know all the purely physical facts and still not know what it is like to have the
experience of seeing blue. Buddhist physicalists would respond by claiming that the conscious mental
state of seeing blue is no more than a useful fiction. What would such a response look like, and could it
succeed