“Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”

What the text says

Chalmers separates the “easy” problems of consciousness — explaining discrimination, attention, verbal report — from the “hard” problem: why does all this processing not go on in the dark? No functional explanation, he argues, can bridge that gap on its own.

He therefore proposes treating experience as a fundamental feature of nature, linked to physical processes by laws yet unknown. Among the principles he puts forward is organisational invariance: two systems with the same fine-grained functional organisation would have the same experiences, whatever they are made of.

Why read it now

That principle, debated for thirty years, has a direct consequence: it would make artificial consciousness possible in principle. The paper supplies the vocabulary of almost every current debate on the question — and reminds us why no behavioural test is enough to settle it.

What remains open

• If a silicon system reproduced exactly the organisation of a brain, would it have the same experiences?

See also