In case any of you had further questions from the video, here's Professor Ted Honderich's handout from the talk:
"Our subject is what it is to be conscious -- what it is for you to be conscious right now. In my typical philosopher's hopeful, confident and proud answer, there are three impulses, ideas and kinds of theory as to the right answer.
One ancient one still tempting such neuroscientists as Dave Chalmers is Dualism: that your consciousness is something non-physical, different in kind from your physical brain. Abstract Functionalism, owned by such as Ned Block, is all too close to it. That is to the effect that your conscious states and events are causes and effects somehow floating above your brain. All that is good in making consciousness different, which everybody knows, and a disaster in making it non-causal, which everybody also knows it is except Australian epiphenomenalists.
The commonest inclination in neuroscience and the like, I take it, is Physicalism. It is that your being conscious right now is a state or event of your objectively or scientifically physical brain. That is good in making consciousness causal, which we bloody know it is, but a disaster in making it just the same in fundamental nature as the chair under you or your toenails.
The third theory is Actualism, which is what you and I believe. It starts uniquely by getting an adequate initial clarification of what we're talking about, consciousness -- before getting to a theory, an analytic account of its nature.
There's a database here, collected from the language of a lot of philosophers and the rest of the world, not just a philosopher's bright idea on Monday morning, or a neuroscientist's thought when she's off work on Sunday.
The database, by way of a descriptive label, is that being conscious is something's being actual. That label is metaphorical or figurative, just like what has issued in a lot or even most science on everything. It results in two questions that a good theory, of course perfectly literal, will answer. What's actual? What's its being actual?
Just as good as starting with a database, there's what we all know, that there's a big difference between consciousness in seeing, consciousness in any kind of perception, and consciousness that is just thinking and consciousness that is just wanting. Perceptual, cognitive, and affective consciousness.
What is actual with your perceptual consciousness in seeing the room you're in right now is a bloody room. Notice I said a, not the. Nothing else. Absolutely no sign, image, representation or anything of the sort. You know the difference between what's a sign o image and what isn't. So do I. A picture that is up on a wall is an image, but a room isn't.
What's actual with you thinking a thought about consciousness, or your wanting to be somewhere else, however, is exactly a representation -- with an attitude attached to it related somehow to truth or to something like what's good.
And what is it for the room or the representation to be actual? It's for it to be physical, but subjectively rather than objectively physical. Physicality in general divides into the two big categories --objecive and subjective.
What is it for the room to be subjectively physical? It's to be out there in space with a lot of other properties, 16 I think, nothing like anything behind your forehead, and for it to be lawfully dependent -- not exactly causally dependent but related to that -- on both the objective room out there and also on your brain.
And an idea or hope of yours, cognitive or affective consciousness, is differently subjectively physical. It is an aboutness as we can say, just as a room is a room, and it is subjectively physical in having a lot of properties related to those of the room, and being dependent on the rest of you -- on you neurally, also known as the personal identity that is you."