Phenomenology Series (Sess 8) Chalmers: The Conscious Mind, Part 1

David Chalmers (1966- present) is a philosopher and cognitive scientist, specializing in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, He is currently a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University (NYU). Chalmers is best known for formulating the hard problem of consciousness, and for popularizing the philosophical zombie thought experiment, which, as luck would have it, we will be discussing at this Meetup and the next as we work through The Conscious Mind.

Chalmer introduces a crucial distinction between

• Phenomenal Consciousness: The subjective, qualitative aspects of experience – what is ‘feels like’ to see colors or taste things.
• Psychological consciousness: The functional and behavioural aspects – how mental states influence cognition.

He argues that mental teams (like “pain”) have some ambiguity, referring to subjective and functional aspects, which leads to two mind-body problems; 1) how physical systems produce psychological functions and 2) how physical system give rise to phenomenal experience. He challenges materialist reduction; i.e., the idea that all facts are logically supervenient on physical facts.

Chalmers proposes an alternative model called naturalistic dualism, which claims that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality in a way analogous to Kant’s view of space and time. He argues against materialism using conceivability arguments, which introduce a curious and novel idea of a philosophical zombie.

This is the first of two Meetups on this The Conscious Mind. Given the Chalmers is an excellent writer, the Meetups promise to engaging and thought provoking. You should find the reading very approachable and even entertaining at times. For this Meetup, we will be reading;

Chapter 1: Two Concepts of Mind, ~30 pages

Chapter 3: Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained?, ~28 pages

Chapter 4: Naturalistic Dualism, ~45 pages.

I will be using the version published by Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-511789-9)

Hope to see you at the session.