The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind) 1st Edition by David J. Chalmers (PDF)

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What is consciousness? How do physical processes in the brain give rise to the self-aware mind and to feelings as profoundly varied as love or hate, aesthetic pleasure or spiritual yearning? These questions today are among the most hotly debated issues among scientists and philosophers, and we have seen in recent years superb volumes by such eminent figures as Francis Crick, Daniel C. Dennett, Gerald Edelman, and Roger Penrose, all firing volleys in what has come to be called the consciousness wars. Now, in The Conscious Mind, philosopher David J. Chalmers offers a cogent analysis of this heated debate as he unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness. Chalmers convincingly reveals how contemporary cognitive science and neurobiology have failed to explain how and why mental events emerge from physiological occurrences in the brain. He proposes instead that conscious experience must be understood in an entirely new light–as an irreducible entity (similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space) that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. And after suggesting some intriguing possibilities about the structure and laws of conscious experience, he details how his unique reinterpretation of the mind could be the focus of a new science. Throughout the book, Chalmers provides fascinating thought experiments that trenchantly illustrate his ideas. For example, in exploring the notion that consciousness could be experienced by machines as well as humans, Chalmers asks us to imagine a thinking brain in which neurons are slowly replaced by silicon chips that precisely duplicate their functions–as the neurons are replaced, will consciousness gradually fade away? The book also features thoughtful discussions of how the author’s theories might be practically applied to subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence and the interpretation of quantum mechanics.All of us have pondered the nature and meaning of consciousness. Engaging and penetrating, The Conscious Mind adds a fresh new perspective to the subject that is sure to spark debate about our understanding of the mind for years to come.

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⭐I admit up front I’m a Chalmers fan and that is not to say that I agree with his many of his speculations concerning properties of the universe yielding consciousness. I like the way Chalmers angles at a subject and explores objections to his view at every step of the process. He does incorporate certain assumptions he fails to explore however and they turn out to be significant.This is Chalmers’ first book (1997) on consciousness, a subject he reprises in 2010 with “The Character of Consciousness” a book I reviewed some time back. In some ways, this book is a clearer exposition than the reprise. The subject matter is more clearly divided. In the first part of the book he argues that materialism must be false because consciousness does not logically supervene on physical process though it does “naturally supervene” on them. His arguments here are carefully crafted and reasonably convincing. He pays careful attention to distinguishing consciousness (the “what it is like to be” nature of subjective experience) from psychological or cognitive states. He is a little to quick here to define this line so sharply but he uses this clean distinction to get a handle on why it is so difficult to connect brain states directly to the subjective experience of consciousness. This line of argument leads Chalmers to a “property dualism” in which a new phenomenon, consciousness that is real but not physical nevertheless emerges from the physical, that is the causally closed physics of modern science. He uses the second half of his book, less persuasively, to propose a speculative solution. So how does this all go?Chalmers posits a set of psychophysical or phenomenal laws in parallel with physical laws. These other laws are not merely aspects of physical law which physicists have not yet discovered (along lines of Thomas Nagel’s “anomalous monism”). Rather they are a complete set of laws, independent of the physical that happen to exist in parallel with it. They are undetectable by physics and moreover they really do not have any effect on the evolution of the universe until the right kind of organization happens to come along (something that might not have happened)at which time they serve to connect up with the physical organization to evoke the new phenomenon of mind.Chalmers glibly assumes that the laws of physics and the psychophysical are eternal. This assumption is problematic for various reasons not central to his theme here, but it does impinge on it. If the physical universe had a beginning, what sense can be made of laws existing eternally prior to there being anything for them to govern or describe? Where does eternality come from? Moreover, an “eternal laws” would imply that all the particulars of relations between particles, radiation, and fields of the physical universe (including the various arbitrary constants that, being what they are, allow for the development of galaxies, stars, planets, and even life) were not just accidents that could have settled into other values but rather had to come out as they did.This is the important part. If only the physical laws had any effect on cosmological evolution up to the appearance of certain organizations then it is quite possible that those types of organizations might never have appeared (they are accidents of contingency). If that had been the history of our universe, then the psychophysical would have been entirely redundant. On the other hand, if the non-material laws had some influence on physical evolution, then that influence ought to be measurable, at least in principle. There is no evidence of such an effect in physics of course and Chalmers doesn’t really care whether life and subsequent consciousness are pure accidents or were in some manner directed. It is the hypothesized connection between the physical and the psychophysical that gives him the “natural supervenience” of the mental on the physical his theory requires.Perhaps an example of my own would make this clearer. Imagine physical law (eternal or otherwise)governs how hydrogen and oxygen interact to form water and produce its special properties. Now imagine that there is, in parallel with physical law, another law (call it XYZ) that is not physical and cannot be detected by any measurement. XYZ is entirely redundant to normal physics and the evolution of physical systems. But whenever liquid water is brought to a temperature of 300F, XYZ turns the water into a purple goo. Now normally there is no liquid water at 300F and so the XYZ law never has any effect on anything but it nevertheless exists along with the more conventional laws of physics that govern the properties of water. At some point in the evolution of the universe there come to be creatures who learn to put water under pressure and do bring its liquid state to a temperature of 300F. To everyone’s surprise, the water turns into purple goo but it remains the case that as before XYZ remains strictly undetectable by physics. What Chalmers would say here is that purple goo does not “logically supervene” on the ordinary laws of physics because we can imagine liquid water at 300F without it becoming purple goo. But purple goo does “naturally supervene” on the laws of physics because XYZ always and automatically connects up water and purple goo whenever the physical conditions are made right.My analogy goes only so far as purple goo is presumably a physical stuff while consciousness is not. Of course there is no non-physical XYZ that turns water into a purple goo. But Chalmers claims exactly this for the phenomenon of consciousness which is non-material (something for which he argues persuasively) and therefore demands a postulate of psychophysical laws which connect up with the physical under appropriate conditions resulting in a non-physical phenomenon. We can imagine all sorts of complex brain states and functional organizations existing, even having psychological and behavioral effects measureable by third parties, without there being any consciousness, that is any experience of what it is like to be a subject. But because psychophysical laws also exist (undetectable by physics), when and if sufficient functional organization comes along (whether in biology, computers, or even societies of persons) the psychophysical laws will be entangled (or activated or envoked) by the functional organization and map the physical organization into a subjective experience.This is a proper “property dualism” for which Chalmers argues. It is a dualism because there is truly something different, that is not material, that emerges in the universe, and it is a “property dualism” because its dualistic (non-material) properties come not from some special antecedent source (for example God as in substance dualism) but from material physics albeit conjoined with psychophysical laws which are (a) non-physical, (b) eternal like the physical laws, and (c) the connecting link between the physical and the subjective-mental.The well known dilemma of substance dualism is the “interaction problem” which challenges the doctrine on the grounds that there is no mechanism by which the physical can interact with the non-material mind stuff. For all his careful work in this book, Chalmers never appreciates the irony that his psychophysical laws must suffer from the very same interaction problem. He offers no mechanism by which this interaction takes place, that is, how it is that certain functional organizations of physical stuff become entangled with the non-physical psychophysical laws. In the end, therefore, while this book is a good example of philosophical exposition, it ends up being very unsatisfying as an explanation for consciousness.

⭐In The Journal of Consciousness Studies, David Chalmers wrote: “ Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted.” The mystery of consciousness revolves around the question: “How can living physical bodies in the physical world acquire such phenomena?” Chalmers favors the non-reductionist, non-physical approach which may ultimately provide pivotal concepts needed to resolve the question.In The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, David Chalmers introduces the notion of the hard problem of consciousness. According to Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness is explaining how we experience it with respect to: (1) sensory inputs and the mysterious modes of their neural processing and (2) qualia – phenomena where the processing is accompanied by ineffably subjective aspects of conscious experience which apprehend the redness of red, the beauty of mathematical forms, love, the selfness experience. These have a relationship with physical brain-states, but are not identical to brain states because they are transcendent – essentially objectively unmeasurable – states of consciousness.Chalmers observes that subjective information processing invariably accompanies sensory and neural signal processing. We do not just retain visual sensations; we judge the quality of colors, the contrast of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field with meaningful images that are conjured up mentally, that are felt emotionally, and inspire experiential conscious thought. What unites these states of consciousness somehow transcends the physical sensory experiences.Empirical science and neuroscience have attempted to explain the nature of conscious experience. But to fully account for conscious experience, Chalmers suggests that we need an extra ingredient to explain and elucidate the hard problem of consciousness. That extra ingredient should explain how accumulated experiences, arising in and retained by the brain, are elaborated, interpreted, and qualified by our consciousness.Roger Penrose and Staurt Hameroff (Toward a Science of Consciousness), suggest that human cognition may depend on quantum wavefunction collapses in microtubules, the cytoskeletons of a neuron. Penrose and Hameroff suspect that wavefunction collapse in microtubules may be the physical basis of conscious experience. In The Conscious Mind, Chalmers writes that although “these ideas are extremely speculative . . . they could at least conceivably help to explain certain elements of human cognitive functioning.”Our embodiment is primarily a survival machine with no inherent consciousness, a Chalmerian zombie. In The Conscious Mind David Chalmers describes an isomorph, “A zombie [that] is just something physically identical to me but which has no conscious experience ‒ all is dark inside.” In any case, survival machines are programmed to respond to and survive their environments, to replicate and evolve, without any urgent need to assume human consciousness or engage in social intercourse.Chalmers argues for the transcendent nature of consciousness; insisting that “consciousness is simply not to be characterized as a functional property” and that, “No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience.” In My Universe – A Transcendent Reality, author Alex Vary proposes a conceptual framework to help elucidate the transcendent nature of consciousness and its relation to the physical world. The proposed framework is based on deductions and information revealed primarily by distinct quantum phenomena which are demonstrably transcendent. An essential feature of the framework is the mesostratum; a signal transmission modality. The mesostratum machinery that Vary imagines offers an explanatory gap-filling linkage from a transcendent continuum to a physical neural discontinuum. Vary suggests ways to access the mesostratum, to explore it, to explain the nature of human consciousness; and cites examples of access to the mesostratum. Chalmers essentially intuits that non-physical agencies (perhaps mesostratum agencies) participated in the appearance and evolution of human consciousness. If mesostratum agencies modulate human consciousness then at least select humans should be able to reciprocally access, explore, and exploit resources of the mesostratum. Anecdotal examples are legion: prodigious savants, geniuses, virtuosos, such as Mozart, Goethe, John von Neuman.

⭐This is a serious work of philosophy that is very detailed and thorough. Consequently is not for the light reader with a general interest in the subject. For the most part I was able to follow all Chalmers’ arguments but there are some places (which he indicates in advance) that are particularly technical and include notation of which I was unfamiliar.Personally, although I find his conclusion that consciousness is on a scale of virtually none all the way through to human consciousness extremely counter-intuitive, it is difficult to refute.This is something of a classic in its field and I decided to read it prior to thinking about starting a philosophy MA with the OU. I’m glad I did, but I’m not sure about doing the MA tho’!

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⭐As a philosophy student already interested in the philosophy of Mind when I began this fantastic work, I can only say that I have been bowled over by the lucid exposition of its arguments, its wide-ranging scope, and its wit.There is something useful to be found in this work for many people, from the interested general reader to the academic. The arguments are persuasive, clear, and so helpfully laid out – at no point was I lost, or seeking extra clarification. Chalmers is an extremely gifted writer, and the cohesion and exposition of his views are astounding. Here is a brief synopsis of the book:- CHAPTERS 1 AND 2 – Chalmers introduces the mind as having, simply put, two aspects – the psychological (desires, beliefs), and the phenomenal (‘feels’, and the ‘what it is like’ element). The two categories may overlap, with the latter including some of the former. The phenomenal aspect of mind is what poses the hard questions about consciousness. Chalmers cashes out his notion of ‘supervenience’, which he uses to define physicalism and dualism. The reductive physicalist position is that the mental (inc. the phenomenal aspects) logically supervene on the physical.- CHAPTERS 3, 4 AND 5 – Chalmers argues, persuasively, that the logical supervenience required for reductive physicalism fails. The arguments presented are a mix of new and previously existing ones, all presented clearly and forcefully. Chalmers proposes his view – naturalistic property dualism – using primarily the argument from the logical possibility of zombies: physically identical beings to us that nevertheless lack qualia. The possibility of such entities is hard to rule out, and that is all Chalmers needs for his argument to go through. Chalmers then considers the apparent tension between his view and our judgments of our own experience – how can we clearly consider our own consciousness with our psychological minds, when consciousness arises due to separate, phenomenal properties?- CHAPTERS 6, 7 AND 8 – Chalmers advances arguments for non-reductive functionalism, his positive theory of the mind in the light of property dualism. Consciousness and cognition (awareness) are shown to cohere, providing a basis for consciousness research in cognitive science. Consideration of cases of fading and dancing qualia reveals that something like the ‘principle of organizational invariance’ holds – that all it takes for consciousness to arise is for a particular functional system to be instantiated. Finally, Chalmers proposes that phenomenal properties arise due to the world being intimately related to computational information at its base level – a bold and controversial thesis.- CHAPTERS 9 AND 10 – Chalmers applies his theory (admitted to be only a sketch, a basis for further research) to the topics of AI and quantum mechanics. The view suggests Strong Artificial Intelligence – the possibility that a machine such as a computer is the right sort of system that could be conscious, just like a human being. The section on quantum mechanics puts forward the hypothesis that Chalmers’ theory, plus a version of the Everett interpretation of QM, is the most favourable approach to one of the most difficult issues in physics – how can QM be such a powerful tool of prediction when the world it suggests seems so wildly different from how we ordinarily take the world to be? This last section functions on its own as an excellent and readable introduction to some of the issues in QM.Overall, a stunning work of philosophy, extremely well written on a fascinating subject.

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