You say - “One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution.”
This isn’t right, the dualism is baked into physicalism. If we start with the idea that the physical consists of the objective features of reality – the stuff physics studies – then it’s this conception of the physical that creates the mind-body problem. If that’s what the physical consists of, we can’t incorporate mind into the physical world. Hence, the dualism and the hard problem.
Physicalist solutions either deny the existence of consciousness (eg eliminativism, functionalism) or deny there is a hard problem. (eg Seth's "real" problem which turns out to be solvable by neuroscience).
Does our society even know how to do ontology anymore?
Panpsychism “solves” the hard problem and that isn’t dualist and it’s also a form of physicalism. It requires a radical redefinition of what the “physical” consists of. If you mean most neuroscientists assume physicalism as a starting point, I agree. But they don't "have a point", they misunderstand the point.
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing or if your point is with me. All I said they had a point about was Chalmers formulation as is repeated ad nauseum, and I did go on to argue they pretty much misunderstand the point.
I was taking issue with this - "One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution.”
I should begin by saying that I have not read Solms & Friston, and so I am getting my understanding of their position from your summary above.
That said, it seems to me they profoundly misunderstand the philosophical dimension of the problem they are trying to address here, and are instead converting a basic epistemological and phenomenological problem into an ontological one, and thereby smuggling their conclusion in as a premise.
This is most notable in the way they seem to leverage both "dual aspect" monism (I take it this is another term for Russell's "neutral monism"?) but also emergentism. But I think these two views are mutually incompatible. If neutral monism argues that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of real stuff, then there is no need to discuss how consciousness would emerge due to specific physical states or systems (neutral monism is in many ways a version of non-physicalist panpsychism—note that according to this monist position, real stuff is no more physical than it is non-physical). On the emergentist reading of property dualism (which holds that basically real stuff is physical, and has physical as well as non-physical properties), consciousness is defined by a set of non-physical properties that are not fundamental but rather arise from—and are metaphysically dependent upon—physical stuff and physical properties. This is a different metaphysical position than neutral or dual-aspect monism, and *if* they are conflating them, this is a huge problem in their proposal.
As I mentioned in a comment on part I, the essential issue here is a conflation of the *contents* of consciousness with consciousness itself *as such*. Confusing these two things is common, especially among physicalist philosophies of mind, but it's a massive epistemological and category error, akin to confusing the Atlantic ocean for the chemical laws that define and cause dihydrogen oxide.
Science is an outgrowth of natural philosophy, and cannot escape the confines of doing philosophy logically and consistently. But too often scientists who engage in philosophical discourse do not seem to have the basic grounding philosophy they would need to contribute helpfully to that discourse (in my humble, humanities-trained opinion).
I think you've read it right, it's one thing to argue the physical/mental are the same substance when you are viewing something like a brain, but you still have the problem that there is a temporal/spacial point at which that physical substance is not mental. I think they're arguing for emergence and simply using dual aspect monism as a way of making all the problems that entails go away.
I do not understand what you mean by "valence", Dictionaries give it meaning in chemistry and immunology, but the only other meaning I can find is "the capacity of one person or thing to react with or affect another in some special way, as by attraction or the facilitation of a function or activity.". I do not understand what this means. Can you elucidate please?
Is there any evidence that there is any non-physical aspect of consciousness, ie, that there is a "problem" that needs solving? We keep returning to Chalmers' "Hard Problem" as if there is something outside of physics to be explained, yet, our every introspective thought is only evidenced by its effect on our bodies and our behaviors. You said it yourself: "One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution". For the same reason, we do not need god to explain consciousness. See also: https://open.substack.com/pub/brianbinsd/p/the-simple-flaw-in-chalmers-argument.
Every introspective thought is only known by experience, that's what "introspective" means. We can "infer" other people have experiences by observing correlations with our experience and our behaviour and assuming the same causal process is happening. Physics has nothing to say about experience, if we relied on physics we wouldn't even know anything was conscious.
Thanks Prudence. I am skeptical however. One can just as easily say "introspection is a physical process within the brain that results in physically manifest behaviors, body state changes, and can lead to additional introspections which have further physical results". One can also just as easily say "Physics has *everything* to say about experience". In other words, one must justify what is non-physical about experience, not just assume it is so. In my own case, I introspect that my thoughts are a part of my physical self and do not exist separate from it.
It’s not assumed to be non-physical, that’s merely the starting point of any explanatory project, we observe the properties of the phenomena we’re trying to explain. The only conscious states anyone has ever observed are their own. This is something unique to consciousness, qualia aren’t publicly available. The observed properties of qualia are what philosophers call “what it is like.” There is something it is like to be in a state of consciousness. Qualia are an inner qualitative feel.
Open a physics textbook, you’ll see properties like dimension, mass, charge, but there won’t be any mention of properties like pain, love, bitterness or boredom. In other words, judging by their observed properties, qualia appear not to be physical states.
And the question is, what are qualia? States of matter? States in a distinct and irreducible mental substance? There’s no shortage of answers. Anyone who answers that qualia are physical states has to overcome the hard problem. There’s no dualism baked into the hard problem, it’s baked into physicalism. The dualism is created because qualia don’t have physical properties, but the physicalist must find some way to show that despite appearances to the contrary. qualia are, in fact, physical states.
Please look at how Chalmers actually defines Phenomenal Consciousness. He defines it as non-physical, and does so as the basis to make his Zombie Twin argument and to declare the Hard Problem of Consciousness. This will point you to the relevant parts of his book: https://open.substack.com/pub/brianbinsd/p/the-simple-flaw-in-chalmers-argument
“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience.” (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness - https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf)
No mention of physics. That’s also the standard definition in philosophy of mind (he references Nagel from 1974).
I would dispute that there is any "definition" in what you've quoted there.
For a concrete definition, please see "The Conscious Mind" (Chalmers, 1996) pages 10-12 and page 94. He is clear to differentiate phenomenal consciousness (outside-of-physics) from psychological consciousness (anything-physical). The former (non-physics) is necessary to support his Zombie Twin argument for the Hard Problem of Consciousness (p. 94+). I do agree that consciousness can be (and has often been) defined to subsume both phenomenal and psychological consciousnesses. However, for Chalmers, it is the strictly-non-physical phenomenal consciousness that undergirds his Hard Problem. The Zombie Twin argument collapses if a person and their zombie have non-identical physics.
If consciousness is merely produced and/or a byproduct of underlying physical causes, then it stands that it has no primacy on its own and isn't capable of doing anything. IOW it's epiphenomenal and that which we'd term "mental causation" is a fantasy and does not and cannot exist.
Easy enough to claim. Is it true?
No. Anyone who's ever felt the crushing sadness of a loved one dying or the unbridled joy of listening to your favorite song knows this viscerally, and it's plainly observable on a scientific scale.
That may sound romantic, but it has real consequences. *Feeling* anything shouldn't have any effect on the body that, according to a Naturalistic account of consciousness, is the product of the body which produces that feeling.
Well if that's true then we can announce that anyone who's ever felt depression is either a liar or doesn't actually feel depressed because there's no reason for us to be concerned that depression has any relevant impact on their well-being. It *can't* as a matter of first principles if this view of consciousness is correct.
Same idea w/ wanting someone to be happy or joyful as a means of improving their physical well-being. If I say I feel encouraged or psyched at listening to my favorite song and want to start working out I must be in a very convincing illusion because, again, that simply cannot happen if my body is merely producing those conscious experiences as an epiphenomenal artifact of other things going on.
Do you see the problem here? This is simply not reality. It's not even a matter of scientific investigation or some rigorous series of studies. It's plainly not our experience of the world at a very fundamental level.
Thank you Ryan for the thorough answer! Alas, I don't see that any of these examples demonstrate "evidence that there is any non-physical aspect of consciousness". Focusing on just one example (though I think the others are similar): joy. Can you identify one demonstrably non-physical manifestation of joy? My body certainly is in a certain state due to joy (various hormones racing). I take certain actions, and shout in glee. I think about my joy, but the only manifestation of that is how it impacts me in the world. All of this is physical. I am truly not trying to be argumentative. I have never understood people's belief that something non-physical is "obviously" at work. I've studied Chalmers et al. I hear no justification deeper than "we just know it".
I would respectfully submit that that's the wrong question. It's not an issue of proving non-physicality, it's that the very idea of the "physical" itself is nonsensical. It has no definitive meaning and precisely no one can pin it down. All attempts to do so end in ambiguity, incoherence and outright contradiction.
For example, say you have an apple in your hand. How would you say it's 'physical'? That it has a definitive position in spacetime and everything we observe about it is expressable through raw quantities?
Say you go that route or something close to it. Now let us suppose you go to sleep at night and find yourself in a lucid dream holding that exact same apple. Principally, how would you differentiate between the 2 apples? Specifically, how would you articulate one as being physical (IOW comprised of non-conscious matter) and the other created by your mind without appealing to abstract assertions like "well one's obviously a dream and the other isn't"?
That’s one deep hole you’re digging! Certainly we can deny the existence of the physical universe and say there is only “mind” - I’m guessing that is a self-consistent position. It just doesn’t strike me as very useful, and I would dare a proponent of that position to live their life as if it were true.
But back to reality, I don’t think Chalmers et al are denying the physical. They are postulating an additional non-physical.
Rest assured you don't need to dare anyone. I do it every single day without any trouble.
It's honestly very comforting (and more in line with our experience of the world) to be sincerely convinced that death is nothing to fear than a Materialist more likely to deny consciousness even exists in the first place, that believes we're effectively an accident w/ no real place to call home and that physical death is the absolute end of everything we know and love, including ourselves, our families, our beloved pets and eventually the entire universe.
If anyone could come up with a more despair-inducing way to view the world and themselves, I can hardly imagine what it is.
Wow that's awesome. You live your life every day knowing that everything you know and love, including yourself, your family, your beloved pets and the universe, does not in fact physically exist? It's all just in your mind, and your mind is the only thing that exists? That sounds lonely and hallucinatory to me, but happy for you that you've got comfort. By the way, why are you talking to me? I don't exist.
>] "What consciousness requires is need—an internal asymmetry between what is and what must be. Hunger, fear, thirst, fatigue—these are not just sensory signals. They are motivators. They give rise to the feeling of urgency, the pressure to act, the experience of being a self in a world that resists."
How is this not circular reasoning? You assert that consciousness requires need, but to *need* something is itself a product of the consciousness that must exist in order to have that need. There's no such thing as a desire absent the one who desires.
A living organism doesn’t need awareness to sustain itself. Its cells regulate temperature, process nutrients, and repair damage automatically. Even simple organisms like bacteria respond to their environment—moving toward food or away from harm—without any sense of self. This self-sustaining activity is driven by internal imbalances: chemical signals that trigger action to restore balance. The organism doesn’t know it is hungry or in danger; it simply reacts. These reactions are not choices—they are built-in responses that keep the organism alive. Life, at its core, is a blind struggle for continuity.
But as organisms become more complex, with more needs and more ways to meet them, this web of self-sustaining reactions starts to create something new: a center of coordination. Over time, the accumulation of pressures and responses gives rise to a point of view—a perspective shaped by the organism’s ongoing effort to survive. Still, it begins not with awareness, but with the necessity of self-maintenance. Consciousness is the eventual outgrowth of this need-driven activity, not its starting point. The self doesn’t power the system; the system, under pressure, gradually awakens into a self.
How does this make any kind of sense though? Effectively you're saying that some arbitrary level of complexity happens and, pardon my bluntness, but BOOM the magic of awareness happens. Why?
How does a system in which you say there is no sense of self nor awareness at the beginning acquire that which is fundamentally unlike anything it's had before? If all there are are unconscious actions and reactions, there's no principled reason for anything conscious to appear, no matter how great the complexity or numbers involved get.
It's like the equivalent of saying that if we've a large enough system of pipes, water & pressure valves then that, too, should become conscious at a large enough scale.
You see? If you're going to make this appeal to actions going on in the brain then you have to apply the same underlying fundamentals to other systems too. It's not as if there's some universally unique kind of atoms and/or subatomic particles in our brains that isn't present anywhere else.
Are we to assume that water systems have some level of awareness too?
First of all, I’m also rejecting the idea that consciousness emerges from sheer complexity. More neurons, more data, or faster processing alone do not produce awareness. Complexity without purpose doesn’t generate a self.
But can something made of unconscious things become self-aware? Yes, just like life can arise from non-life. Life isn’t in the atoms of a living being—they’re the same atoms found in rocks or air. What makes something alive is how those atoms are organized to maintain and reproduce themselves.
Material things organized together produce something immaterial more than the material components. This is not magic. A building is not reducible to its brick and mortar; it’s in also in the relation between the components. Yes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, because the parts are doing something together that none could do alone. You don’t need a separate ontological plane for the abstract concept of a building to meaningfully talk about a whole irreducible to brick and mortar.
I am saying that consciousness can only arise in a living being under pressure to sustain itself. A self-sustaining organism, in trying to keep itself alive, gradually develops internal systems that monitor hunger, fatigue, threat, and action. As these systems grow more complex and integrated, they begin to model not just the environment, but the organism’s own state as part of that environment. That’s the root of self-awareness: when the system includes itself in what it needs to understand in order to survive.
A pipe system, no matter how complex, doesn’t become self-aware because it has no need to sustain itself. It doesn’t model its state or adapt to survive. Without internal stakes, there’s no basis for awareness.
>] "I am saying that consciousness can only arise in a living being under pressure to sustain itself. A self-sustaining organism, in trying to keep itself alive, gradually develops internal systems that monitor hunger, fatigue, threat, and action. As these systems grow more complex and integrated, they begin to model not just the environment, but the organism’s own state as part of that environment. That’s the root of self-awareness: when the system includes itself in what it needs to understand in order to survive."
Respectfully, this is pure abstraction. You're not actually saying anything. What is "modeling not just the environment, but the organism's own state as part of the environment" supposed to mean in reality? What do you mean by a "model"? Is this supposed to infer some sort of illusion?
Let’s start with a bacterium. It can’t think or feel, but it does respond to its environment. If there’s food nearby, it moves toward it; if there’s something harmful, it moves away. This isn’t awareness—it’s a simple chemical reaction to external signals. Now imagine a more complex organism that has to react to a more complex environment. It has to keep track of many signals at once: temperature, hunger, injury, memory of past outcomes. At some point, it becomes useful for the system to monitor how it’s doing, not just what’s around it. That’s what I mean by a model: the organism gathers and uses information about its own internal state to guide action. It’s still reacting to the world—but now it includes itself in what it tracks. That’s the first step toward self-awareness—not an illusion, but a real biological function.
You say - “One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution.”
This isn’t right, the dualism is baked into physicalism. If we start with the idea that the physical consists of the objective features of reality – the stuff physics studies – then it’s this conception of the physical that creates the mind-body problem. If that’s what the physical consists of, we can’t incorporate mind into the physical world. Hence, the dualism and the hard problem.
Physicalist solutions either deny the existence of consciousness (eg eliminativism, functionalism) or deny there is a hard problem. (eg Seth's "real" problem which turns out to be solvable by neuroscience).
Does our society even know how to do ontology anymore?
It also happens to be baked into Chalmer's argument, that's my point, since most philosophers use it as a starting position.
Panpsychism “solves” the hard problem and that isn’t dualist and it’s also a form of physicalism. It requires a radical redefinition of what the “physical” consists of. If you mean most neuroscientists assume physicalism as a starting point, I agree. But they don't "have a point", they misunderstand the point.
I'm not quite sure what you're arguing or if your point is with me. All I said they had a point about was Chalmers formulation as is repeated ad nauseum, and I did go on to argue they pretty much misunderstand the point.
I was taking issue with this - "One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution.”
Please see https://open.substack.com/pub/brianbinsd/p/the-simple-flaw-in-chalmers-argument. It is baked into Chalmers' argument.
I should begin by saying that I have not read Solms & Friston, and so I am getting my understanding of their position from your summary above.
That said, it seems to me they profoundly misunderstand the philosophical dimension of the problem they are trying to address here, and are instead converting a basic epistemological and phenomenological problem into an ontological one, and thereby smuggling their conclusion in as a premise.
This is most notable in the way they seem to leverage both "dual aspect" monism (I take it this is another term for Russell's "neutral monism"?) but also emergentism. But I think these two views are mutually incompatible. If neutral monism argues that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of real stuff, then there is no need to discuss how consciousness would emerge due to specific physical states or systems (neutral monism is in many ways a version of non-physicalist panpsychism—note that according to this monist position, real stuff is no more physical than it is non-physical). On the emergentist reading of property dualism (which holds that basically real stuff is physical, and has physical as well as non-physical properties), consciousness is defined by a set of non-physical properties that are not fundamental but rather arise from—and are metaphysically dependent upon—physical stuff and physical properties. This is a different metaphysical position than neutral or dual-aspect monism, and *if* they are conflating them, this is a huge problem in their proposal.
As I mentioned in a comment on part I, the essential issue here is a conflation of the *contents* of consciousness with consciousness itself *as such*. Confusing these two things is common, especially among physicalist philosophies of mind, but it's a massive epistemological and category error, akin to confusing the Atlantic ocean for the chemical laws that define and cause dihydrogen oxide.
Science is an outgrowth of natural philosophy, and cannot escape the confines of doing philosophy logically and consistently. But too often scientists who engage in philosophical discourse do not seem to have the basic grounding philosophy they would need to contribute helpfully to that discourse (in my humble, humanities-trained opinion).
I think you've read it right, it's one thing to argue the physical/mental are the same substance when you are viewing something like a brain, but you still have the problem that there is a temporal/spacial point at which that physical substance is not mental. I think they're arguing for emergence and simply using dual aspect monism as a way of making all the problems that entails go away.
I do not understand what you mean by "valence", Dictionaries give it meaning in chemistry and immunology, but the only other meaning I can find is "the capacity of one person or thing to react with or affect another in some special way, as by attraction or the facilitation of a function or activity.". I do not understand what this means. Can you elucidate please?
Apologies, definition here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(psychology)
Is there any evidence that there is any non-physical aspect of consciousness, ie, that there is a "problem" that needs solving? We keep returning to Chalmers' "Hard Problem" as if there is something outside of physics to be explained, yet, our every introspective thought is only evidenced by its effect on our bodies and our behaviors. You said it yourself: "One problem with Chalmers’ formulation of the hard problem has always been that it has dualism baked into its axioms, and this makes it unsolvable without dualism as a solution". For the same reason, we do not need god to explain consciousness. See also: https://open.substack.com/pub/brianbinsd/p/the-simple-flaw-in-chalmers-argument.
Every introspective thought is only known by experience, that's what "introspective" means. We can "infer" other people have experiences by observing correlations with our experience and our behaviour and assuming the same causal process is happening. Physics has nothing to say about experience, if we relied on physics we wouldn't even know anything was conscious.
Thanks Prudence. I am skeptical however. One can just as easily say "introspection is a physical process within the brain that results in physically manifest behaviors, body state changes, and can lead to additional introspections which have further physical results". One can also just as easily say "Physics has *everything* to say about experience". In other words, one must justify what is non-physical about experience, not just assume it is so. In my own case, I introspect that my thoughts are a part of my physical self and do not exist separate from it.
It’s not assumed to be non-physical, that’s merely the starting point of any explanatory project, we observe the properties of the phenomena we’re trying to explain. The only conscious states anyone has ever observed are their own. This is something unique to consciousness, qualia aren’t publicly available. The observed properties of qualia are what philosophers call “what it is like.” There is something it is like to be in a state of consciousness. Qualia are an inner qualitative feel.
Open a physics textbook, you’ll see properties like dimension, mass, charge, but there won’t be any mention of properties like pain, love, bitterness or boredom. In other words, judging by their observed properties, qualia appear not to be physical states.
And the question is, what are qualia? States of matter? States in a distinct and irreducible mental substance? There’s no shortage of answers. Anyone who answers that qualia are physical states has to overcome the hard problem. There’s no dualism baked into the hard problem, it’s baked into physicalism. The dualism is created because qualia don’t have physical properties, but the physicalist must find some way to show that despite appearances to the contrary. qualia are, in fact, physical states.
Please look at how Chalmers actually defines Phenomenal Consciousness. He defines it as non-physical, and does so as the basis to make his Zombie Twin argument and to declare the Hard Problem of Consciousness. This will point you to the relevant parts of his book: https://open.substack.com/pub/brianbinsd/p/the-simple-flaw-in-chalmers-argument
Here’s Chalmer’s definition -
“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience.” (Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness - https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf)
No mention of physics. That’s also the standard definition in philosophy of mind (he references Nagel from 1974).
I would dispute that there is any "definition" in what you've quoted there.
For a concrete definition, please see "The Conscious Mind" (Chalmers, 1996) pages 10-12 and page 94. He is clear to differentiate phenomenal consciousness (outside-of-physics) from psychological consciousness (anything-physical). The former (non-physics) is necessary to support his Zombie Twin argument for the Hard Problem of Consciousness (p. 94+). I do agree that consciousness can be (and has often been) defined to subsume both phenomenal and psychological consciousnesses. However, for Chalmers, it is the strictly-non-physical phenomenal consciousness that undergirds his Hard Problem. The Zombie Twin argument collapses if a person and their zombie have non-identical physics.
If consciousness is merely produced and/or a byproduct of underlying physical causes, then it stands that it has no primacy on its own and isn't capable of doing anything. IOW it's epiphenomenal and that which we'd term "mental causation" is a fantasy and does not and cannot exist.
Easy enough to claim. Is it true?
No. Anyone who's ever felt the crushing sadness of a loved one dying or the unbridled joy of listening to your favorite song knows this viscerally, and it's plainly observable on a scientific scale.
That may sound romantic, but it has real consequences. *Feeling* anything shouldn't have any effect on the body that, according to a Naturalistic account of consciousness, is the product of the body which produces that feeling.
Well if that's true then we can announce that anyone who's ever felt depression is either a liar or doesn't actually feel depressed because there's no reason for us to be concerned that depression has any relevant impact on their well-being. It *can't* as a matter of first principles if this view of consciousness is correct.
Same idea w/ wanting someone to be happy or joyful as a means of improving their physical well-being. If I say I feel encouraged or psyched at listening to my favorite song and want to start working out I must be in a very convincing illusion because, again, that simply cannot happen if my body is merely producing those conscious experiences as an epiphenomenal artifact of other things going on.
Do you see the problem here? This is simply not reality. It's not even a matter of scientific investigation or some rigorous series of studies. It's plainly not our experience of the world at a very fundamental level.
Thank you Ryan for the thorough answer! Alas, I don't see that any of these examples demonstrate "evidence that there is any non-physical aspect of consciousness". Focusing on just one example (though I think the others are similar): joy. Can you identify one demonstrably non-physical manifestation of joy? My body certainly is in a certain state due to joy (various hormones racing). I take certain actions, and shout in glee. I think about my joy, but the only manifestation of that is how it impacts me in the world. All of this is physical. I am truly not trying to be argumentative. I have never understood people's belief that something non-physical is "obviously" at work. I've studied Chalmers et al. I hear no justification deeper than "we just know it".
I would respectfully submit that that's the wrong question. It's not an issue of proving non-physicality, it's that the very idea of the "physical" itself is nonsensical. It has no definitive meaning and precisely no one can pin it down. All attempts to do so end in ambiguity, incoherence and outright contradiction.
For example, say you have an apple in your hand. How would you say it's 'physical'? That it has a definitive position in spacetime and everything we observe about it is expressable through raw quantities?
Say you go that route or something close to it. Now let us suppose you go to sleep at night and find yourself in a lucid dream holding that exact same apple. Principally, how would you differentiate between the 2 apples? Specifically, how would you articulate one as being physical (IOW comprised of non-conscious matter) and the other created by your mind without appealing to abstract assertions like "well one's obviously a dream and the other isn't"?
That’s one deep hole you’re digging! Certainly we can deny the existence of the physical universe and say there is only “mind” - I’m guessing that is a self-consistent position. It just doesn’t strike me as very useful, and I would dare a proponent of that position to live their life as if it were true.
But back to reality, I don’t think Chalmers et al are denying the physical. They are postulating an additional non-physical.
Rest assured you don't need to dare anyone. I do it every single day without any trouble.
It's honestly very comforting (and more in line with our experience of the world) to be sincerely convinced that death is nothing to fear than a Materialist more likely to deny consciousness even exists in the first place, that believes we're effectively an accident w/ no real place to call home and that physical death is the absolute end of everything we know and love, including ourselves, our families, our beloved pets and eventually the entire universe.
If anyone could come up with a more despair-inducing way to view the world and themselves, I can hardly imagine what it is.
Wow that's awesome. You live your life every day knowing that everything you know and love, including yourself, your family, your beloved pets and the universe, does not in fact physically exist? It's all just in your mind, and your mind is the only thing that exists? That sounds lonely and hallucinatory to me, but happy for you that you've got comfort. By the way, why are you talking to me? I don't exist.
Consciousness becomes less perplexing once you link it to self-interest. I wrote a short piece here: https://socialnaturalist.substack.com/p/i-need-therefore-i-become-why-ai?r=1a5aj6&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
>] "What consciousness requires is need—an internal asymmetry between what is and what must be. Hunger, fear, thirst, fatigue—these are not just sensory signals. They are motivators. They give rise to the feeling of urgency, the pressure to act, the experience of being a self in a world that resists."
How is this not circular reasoning? You assert that consciousness requires need, but to *need* something is itself a product of the consciousness that must exist in order to have that need. There's no such thing as a desire absent the one who desires.
A living organism doesn’t need awareness to sustain itself. Its cells regulate temperature, process nutrients, and repair damage automatically. Even simple organisms like bacteria respond to their environment—moving toward food or away from harm—without any sense of self. This self-sustaining activity is driven by internal imbalances: chemical signals that trigger action to restore balance. The organism doesn’t know it is hungry or in danger; it simply reacts. These reactions are not choices—they are built-in responses that keep the organism alive. Life, at its core, is a blind struggle for continuity.
But as organisms become more complex, with more needs and more ways to meet them, this web of self-sustaining reactions starts to create something new: a center of coordination. Over time, the accumulation of pressures and responses gives rise to a point of view—a perspective shaped by the organism’s ongoing effort to survive. Still, it begins not with awareness, but with the necessity of self-maintenance. Consciousness is the eventual outgrowth of this need-driven activity, not its starting point. The self doesn’t power the system; the system, under pressure, gradually awakens into a self.
How does this make any kind of sense though? Effectively you're saying that some arbitrary level of complexity happens and, pardon my bluntness, but BOOM the magic of awareness happens. Why?
How does a system in which you say there is no sense of self nor awareness at the beginning acquire that which is fundamentally unlike anything it's had before? If all there are are unconscious actions and reactions, there's no principled reason for anything conscious to appear, no matter how great the complexity or numbers involved get.
It's like the equivalent of saying that if we've a large enough system of pipes, water & pressure valves then that, too, should become conscious at a large enough scale.
You see? If you're going to make this appeal to actions going on in the brain then you have to apply the same underlying fundamentals to other systems too. It's not as if there's some universally unique kind of atoms and/or subatomic particles in our brains that isn't present anywhere else.
Are we to assume that water systems have some level of awareness too?
First of all, I’m also rejecting the idea that consciousness emerges from sheer complexity. More neurons, more data, or faster processing alone do not produce awareness. Complexity without purpose doesn’t generate a self.
But can something made of unconscious things become self-aware? Yes, just like life can arise from non-life. Life isn’t in the atoms of a living being—they’re the same atoms found in rocks or air. What makes something alive is how those atoms are organized to maintain and reproduce themselves.
Material things organized together produce something immaterial more than the material components. This is not magic. A building is not reducible to its brick and mortar; it’s in also in the relation between the components. Yes, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, because the parts are doing something together that none could do alone. You don’t need a separate ontological plane for the abstract concept of a building to meaningfully talk about a whole irreducible to brick and mortar.
I am saying that consciousness can only arise in a living being under pressure to sustain itself. A self-sustaining organism, in trying to keep itself alive, gradually develops internal systems that monitor hunger, fatigue, threat, and action. As these systems grow more complex and integrated, they begin to model not just the environment, but the organism’s own state as part of that environment. That’s the root of self-awareness: when the system includes itself in what it needs to understand in order to survive.
A pipe system, no matter how complex, doesn’t become self-aware because it has no need to sustain itself. It doesn’t model its state or adapt to survive. Without internal stakes, there’s no basis for awareness.
>] "I am saying that consciousness can only arise in a living being under pressure to sustain itself. A self-sustaining organism, in trying to keep itself alive, gradually develops internal systems that monitor hunger, fatigue, threat, and action. As these systems grow more complex and integrated, they begin to model not just the environment, but the organism’s own state as part of that environment. That’s the root of self-awareness: when the system includes itself in what it needs to understand in order to survive."
Respectfully, this is pure abstraction. You're not actually saying anything. What is "modeling not just the environment, but the organism's own state as part of the environment" supposed to mean in reality? What do you mean by a "model"? Is this supposed to infer some sort of illusion?
Let’s start with a bacterium. It can’t think or feel, but it does respond to its environment. If there’s food nearby, it moves toward it; if there’s something harmful, it moves away. This isn’t awareness—it’s a simple chemical reaction to external signals. Now imagine a more complex organism that has to react to a more complex environment. It has to keep track of many signals at once: temperature, hunger, injury, memory of past outcomes. At some point, it becomes useful for the system to monitor how it’s doing, not just what’s around it. That’s what I mean by a model: the organism gathers and uses information about its own internal state to guide action. It’s still reacting to the world—but now it includes itself in what it tracks. That’s the first step toward self-awareness—not an illusion, but a real biological function.