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The Conscious MindFeatured AudioDavid Chalmers: They Could Be Zombies
Part One: “The hard problem” of consciousness: why doesn’t everything just go on in the dark? Listen | Read Transcript Part Two: Why inner states seem to defy description. Why consciousness has become a respectable subject again. What we can learn from thinking about zombies. Listen | Read Transcript Part Three: If physicalism is not enough, than what more do we need? Is some form of proto-consciousness built into the fundamental physical particles? Does information processing give rise to experience? If so, what would it be like to be a thermostat? Listen | Read Transcript Part Four: Consciousness and the causally closed physical universe. Maybe epiphenomenalism isn’t so bad. And some critical reflections on Searle’s “biological naturalism.” Listen | Read Transcript
Every two years, some of the world’s deepest thinkers about consciousness and cognition gather in Tucson, Arizona, for a Bacchic celebration of unconsciousness, the Zombie Blues and Poetry Slam. It’s the culminating event of “Towards a Science of Consciousness,” the biennial conference of cognitive scientists, brain researchers, philosophers, and a smattering of aluminum foil hats, sponsored by the University of Arizona’s Center for Consciousness Studies, and its leading light and zombie-in-chief is the philosopher David Chalmers. The zombies in question pose little danger to civilians. They are philosophical zombies—basically a thought experiment—one that figured prominently in Chalmers’ influential 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Zombies are functionally identical to us in every way, but they have no conscious experience. As the saying goes, “there is nothing that it is like to be them.” The fact that we can imagine unconscious zombies without logical contradiction, Chalmers argues, shows that purely physicalist accounts of brain processes or cognitive functioning don’t add up to consciousness. “The fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact.” Accounting for that extra fact of conscious experience—why it doesn’t all just go on in the dark—is what Chalmers has called “the hard problem” of consciousness. Chalmers is, by his own admission, a lapsed materialist, and a reluctant dualist. Consciousness arises because of the functional organization of the brain, he says, but it is something more than just brain functioning. He explores the possibility that any system that processes information might give rise to conscious experience—speculating, for example, what it might be like to be a thermostat—and his extended notion of “information” as any “difference that makes a difference” leads him into the realm of panpsychism, where some degree of consciousness may be a feature of everything. But because consciousness is something extra or on top of the causal functioning of cognition, Chalmers is more skeptical about free will. Consciousness may just be a kind of subjective emanation that goes along for the ride, an epiphenomenon. These very broad speculations, worked out in great detail, have continued to provoke articles, conference presentations, and some sniper fire (a 1997 exchange between Chalmers and John Searle in the New York Review of Books provides a delicious example of scholarly invective), and “the hard problem” has become a standard entry in the philosophical lexicon. |
