vilapositionen

Vilapositionen refers to a specific philosophical stance or argument within discussions of consciousness and personal identity. It is primarily associated with the philosopher David Chalmers. The core idea of vilapositionen suggests that there are certain fundamental aspects of consciousness, particularly subjective experience or "qualia," that cannot be fully explained or reduced to purely physical or computational processes. In essence, vilapositionen posits that while the physical mechanisms of the brain might be understood, the subjective "what it's like" quality of experience remains an irreducible phenomenon.

This viewpoint often arises in the context of the "hard problem of consciousness," a term also coined by Chalmers. The hard problem distinguishes itself from the "easy problems," which concern the functional and behavioral aspects of consciousness that can, in principle, be explained by neuroscience and cognitive science. Vilapositionen, therefore, represents a position that acknowledges the explanatory gap between physical processes and subjective experience. It does not necessarily deny that consciousness is related to physical processes, but rather that a complete explanation requires more than just a physicalist or computational account. The term itself is not widely used, and the concepts it embodies are more commonly discussed under the umbrella of philosophical zombies, the explanatory gap, or non-reductive physicalism.