Notes from the Wired

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

December 10, 2025 | 1,366 words | 7min read

Paper Title: Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

Link to Paper: https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAFUT

Date: 1995

Paper Type: Philosophy, Ontology, Consciousness

Short Abstract: In this paper, David Chalmers differentiates the easy problem from the hard problem of consciousness and argues that scientific theories have so far offered solutions only to the easy problem. He then presents his own attempt to address the hard problem of consciousness, arguing for a form of dualism in which experience is fundamental in addition to the physical. He also proposes several laws that such a theory would need to follow.

1. Introduction

Consciousness is a hard and mysterious problem with many attempts to explain it, but all of them fall short of their target.

In this paper, Chalmers first isolates the hard problem from the easier ones, then critiques recent work that fails to adequately explain the hard problem, and finally presents his own account of how consciousness should be understood.

2. The Easy Problems and the Hard Problem

“Consciousness” is an ambiguous term that can mean different things. Some of these things can be explained more easily than others. The easier ones can be understood through standard scientific methods, while the harder problem seems to resist such methods.

Easy problems include:

All of these phenomena are connected to consciousness. For example, we sometimes say someone is conscious if they can verbally report their inner life, or that an action is conscious when it is deliberate.

All of these phenomena can be explained through scientific inquiry. Explaining them involves identifying the mechanisms through which they work. For example, to explain sleep and wakefulness, it is enough to describe the neurophysical mechanisms that occur during these two states. This is why these are called easy problems: they can be straightforwardly investigated using science.

The really hard problem of consciousness is experience. Consciousness has a subjective aspect—what Nagel calls something it is like to be conscious. Seeing is not just a mechanical process inside the body; in addition to the functional account, there is the experience of seeing. The sound of music or the smell of a flower are also states of experience. The question is: why does visual or auditory processing give rise to visual or auditory experience? Why is there something it is like to experience the color blue or to hear music?

Sometimes instead of “experience,” authors use terms such as phenomenal consciousness, qualia, or conscious experience. In this text, for simplicity, Chalmers uses “experience.”

One way to disentangle the ambiguity of the term “consciousness” is to reserve it for experience and use “awareness” for the other functions.

3. Functional Explanation

Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard?

The easy problems are easy because they require functional explanation, and the methods of cognitive science are well suited to this. To explain reportability of inner states, it is enough to explain how a system can perform the function of producing such reports. To explain integration and control of information, we must explain how central processes bring information together and use it for behavior. These are all problems about explaining functions.

And how do we explain a function? By providing a mechanism that performs that function—something cognitive science is perfectly suited for.

In this way, the easy problems are trivial: all it means for reportability to be part of a system is that the system has the capacity to report internal information. All it means for a system to be awake is that it receives the appropriate signals from the environment.

Throughout science, reductionism works in exactly this way. For example, to explain genes, we identify the mechanism that stores and transmits hereditary information—DNA. Once we explain how DNA functions, we have explained genes. The same is true for most problems in cognitive science: if we show a mechanism that performs the job, we have explained the job.

But when it comes to consciousness, this fails. Consciousness seems to go beyond function. Even if we explain all the easy problems, we can still ask: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?

If someone said, “You have explained how DNA stores hereditary information, but not how it is a gene,” they would be making a conceptual mistake, because a gene just is something that performs that function. But if someone says, “You have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but not how it is experienced,” they are not making a conceptual mistake. This is a genuine further question.

Why does all this information-processing not happen “in the dark,” without any inner feel? We know consciousness arises when these functions are performed, but why?

This is the explanatory gap that requires a bridge.

4. Some Case Studies

Many theories of consciousness have been proposed, but upon close analysis, they typically target only the easy problems:

A satisfactory theory of consciousness must answer not only which processes give rise to experience or how experience is structured, but why experience occurs in the first place.

5. The “Extra Ingredient”

To account for conscious experience, an extra ingredient seems to be needed.

Several suggestions have been made:

Quantum processes may underlie consciousness, but they do not entail experience. Purely physical accounts explain physical structures and functions well, but experience does not follow conceptually from the physical alone.

This resembles the vitalist argument that mechanistic explanations could not explain life. But in that case, the challenge was due to lack of knowledge. In the case of experience, the problem appears conceptual, not merely empirical.

6. Nonreductive Explanation

An alternative to reductive explanation is nonreductive explanation. In physics, some entities are fundamental—they are not explained by anything simpler; rather, they form the basic layer from which everything else arises.

Chalmers suggests treating experience as fundamental. If experience is fundamental, we can construct a theory around it. Furthermore, if something is fundamental, there must be fundamental laws governing it. These basic principles would explain consciousness to some extent.

Taking experience as fundamental does not explain where it comes from—but this is equally true for all fundamental entities in physics.

This position can be classified as a kind of dualism. Chalmers calls it naturalistic dualism.

7. Outline of a Theory of Consciousness

Chalmers proposes several basic principles for experience:

  1. The Principle of Structural Coherence: Consciousness mirrors the structure of the world. There is an isomorphism between the structure of consciousness and the structure of awareness.

  2. The Principle of Organizational Invariance: Any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. It does not matter whether a system is made of biological matter or silicon; if the structure and functional organization are the same, the experiences will be the same.

  3. The Double-Aspect Theory of Information: Information has two fundamental aspects: a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect.

8. Conclusion

Chalmers’ theory is speculative and more of an idea than a fully developed theory, but it may serve as a foundation for future progress.

Email Icon reply via email
▲
Made with Hugo, website licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. I2P Mascot I2P