Chalmers on How To Solve The Hard Problem of Consciousness


Chalmers suggestion for addressing the hard problem is to posit that consciousness is a fundamental feature or law such as space, time, mass, and change in that it is not reducible or explained in terms of more basic entities. So it will have its own rules and regulations, like the other basic or fundamental features of our world do. He wants to call them psychophysical laws. This wouldn’t be without precedent for Chalmers as he notes that electromagnetic phenomena couldn’t be explained by previously known physical features and laws, and so they had to posit electromagnetic charge as a new basic feature of the world since nothing in the physical world could explain it. Likewise with consciousness, since there seems to be no already existing theories which encompasses it, then something new is required.

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