Abstract

Although Heidegger never engages directly with the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, his account of Being-in-the-world—which depicts the lives of thinking, feeling and willing agents as an essentially shared and public worldly phenomenon—entails that those lives could not differ profoundly and systematically as the classic thought-experiments that inspire the ‘hard problem’ envisage. ‘So much the worse for Heidegger!’, one might conclude. But drawing on his account, we can also arrive at a diagnosis of why such thought experiments might seem compelling even if that account were to be correct. Key elements of this diagnosis are (1) the rejection of a rationalistic conception of how we grasp phenomenal properties, (2) the depiction of samples of such properties as what one might call ‘descriptive tools’, mastery of which is essential to that grasp, and (3) an understanding of why such tools nevertheless typically do not form part of the phenomenological content of our ordinary engagement with these properties. This Heideggerian account challenges the ‘hard problem’ by suggesting that sense cannot be assigned to zombies, inverted spectra and the like even though such possibilities will necessarily seem imaginable—the crucial fact that makes the ‘hard problem’ appear to be a problem.