David Chalmers
Philosophy of MindContemporaryAustralian
He named the hard problem of consciousness — why physical processes feel like anything at all — and no one has solved it yet.
Chalmers drew a line in the philosophy of mind that has not been crossed. The easy problems of consciousness — how the brain processes information, controls behavior, integrates sensory data — are merely technically difficult. The hard problem is different: why does any of this feel like anything? Why is there subjective experience at all? Why, when light hits your eye and neurons fire, is there something it is like to see red? He argued that no physical account of brain function, however complete, would explain the existence of qualitative experience — qualia — and that this is not a gap that more neuroscience will close but a genuinely deep philosophical problem. He proposed a variety of possible answers, including property dualism and panpsychism, and did not claim certainty about which was right. The hard problem is now a standard part of every philosophy of mind curriculum. Chalmers is still alive, still working on it, and has not yet decided that it is easy.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious aspect of our lives.”
“Why does the performance of these functions feel like something from the inside?”
Works
Life & Moments
Names the hard problem of consciousness
At the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson in 1994, Chalmers presented a paper distinguishing the easy problems of consciousness (explaining cognitive functions) from the hard problem (explaining why any of it is accompanied by subjective experience at all). The phrase 'hard problem' immediately entered the literature and has organized consciousness research since.
NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness
Chalmers joined New York University in 2004, eventually co-directing the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness with Ned Block. NYU became the world's leading department for philosophy of mind. His presence attracted a generation of researchers to the hard problem and kept consciousness at the center of analytic philosophy.
Influence
Influenced by
- John Searle
Searle and Chalmers directly engaged each other's arguments in the consciousness debates of the 1990s, Searle insisting consciousness is a straightforward biological property of brains against Chalmers's case that the hard problem resists any such easy naturalization.
- Thomas Nagel
Chalmers built directly on Nagel's bat argument in formulating the hard problem of consciousness, crediting Nagel as the philosopher who first showed, rather than merely asserted, why subjective experience resists reduction to physical description.
