In “The Privacy of First-Personal Perspective: Engaging with Indian Philosophy of Cosmopsychism,” published on the Blog of the APA, Philosophy graduate student Munema Moiz discusses one of contemporary philosophy’s most pertinent challenges–the so-called hard problem of consciousness–and then critically examines it through the lens of non-Western thought, specifically, that of Indian philosophy.
The hard problem deals with how consciousness arises from physical matter and assumes the existence of a subjective and private feeling to conscious experience that differentiates it from physical processes. In this view, the former, private experience remains unknowable to another, different subjective consciousness, while physical processes are indeed accessible objectively and from an outside perspective (“third-personally”). This assumption is ubiquitous in Euro-American philosophy, but, startlingly, the privacy of first-personal perspective is denied by a prominent tenth-century Indian philosopher named Utpaladeva.
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