The Conscious Mind

Introduction

Chalmers’s first book, published by Oxford University Press in 1996, develops the “hard problem” of consciousness he had presented at a conference in Tucson in 1994 and in a paper of 1995: why are physical processes accompanied by experience at all? The “easy” problems concern functions such as attention or the reporting of mental states. Chalmers argues that zombies – beings physically identical to us but without experience – are conceivable, so consciousness does not follow logically from the physical facts. He defends a “naturalistic dualism” in which experience is a basic feature of the world, tied to physical processes by psychophysical laws, and takes panpsychism seriously. The term “hard problem” has since become standard.

Connections

Builds on

• Naming and Necessity1972 · Saul Kripke
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat?1974 · Thomas Nagel

Criticizes

• Consciousness Explained1991 · Daniel Dennett

Appears in

• Journey ‘The Riddle of Consciousness’ · Stop 10 of 10