Chalmerism is the overwhelmingly dominant belief that what we perceive is “subjective experience,” and that this so-called “subjective experience” is not material reality, but an illusion created by the mammalian brain. Chalmers then labels this “subjective experience” as “consciousness,” then puts forward the “hard problem of consciousness” which is basically that, if what we perceive has nothing to do with material reality, then material reality is always outside of what we perceive, and so there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between this material reality and perception.
Any material explanation would consist of things which lack perceptible characteristics (which, remember, Chalmers called these “consciousness”), and so there would be causal disconnect between that and what we perceive. Any description consisting of a collection of invisible stuff would never explain what we actually observe/experience/etc.
I find that most people these days seem to be Chalmerites, without even knowing who Chalmers even is (or Nagel, who Chalmers cites as inspiration for a lot of his ideas). Chalmerism is so popular that people end up adopting it without even knowing its origin. I even find most materialists I talk to are Chalmerites; they think the “hard-problem of consciousness” is a real, serious problem for materialism, and a few people here even on Lemmygrad called me a “vulgar materialist” for saying I did not believe in Chalmerism.
However, in my opinion, Chalmerism is not actually compatible with materialism because its premises directly contradict materialism.
The word “materialism” typically implies that we are only materialists, and thus we are also substance monists. If we only believe in one substance, then what we perceive has to be material reality. To say it is anything else is to already abandon materialism, because you would be claiming something else exists other than material reality, where what is “experienced” somehow occupies a second substantive category.
That is to say, all monists of any shape have to ultimately be direct realists, or else their worldview is incoherent.
Usually, the response I get is that direct realism cannot work because of “illusions.” However, I’d highly recommend people read Jocelyn Benoist’s book Toward a Contextual Realism, because he addresses all of these concerns quite well.
You see, if we are materialists, then a true illusion in the sense of something which only occupies the mind without any underlying material origin, cannot exist. Let me give you an analogy.
Let’s say you place a pencil half submerged in a cup of water. We might say that there is an illusion because it “looks bent.” However, if we investigate further, we find it is not really bent when we take it out of the water… but why does it look like that when it is in the water? Well, again, with further investigation, we find that it is due to the refraction of light in water.
That is to say, we can amend our incorrect statement that the pencil “looks bent” to “the pencil looks exactly like what a non-bent pencil half-submerged in a glass of whatever looks like.” That is just what a non-bent pencil in that context looks like, and we have a material explanation as to why it looks like that.
It was therefore never a true “illusion” at all. If you are a monist, then all so-called “illusions” must actually just be emergent properties. An emergent property is still materially real, but its cause requires an understanding of some underlying complexities that give rise to that property, in this case, an understanding of how light refracts in water. Everything you perceive must either be fundamental or emergent, none can be a true “illusion.”
I think people also find Chalmerism convincing because what I see obviously isn’t the same as what you see, and, of course, “true reality” should be independent of the observer, so it sounds intuitive to say that what we perceive cannot literally be reality.
However, to borrow language from Benoist again, this argument, in a rather subtle way, conflates subjectivity with contextuality.
Consider one observer watching a moving train fly by while they sit on next to the tracks, and another riding aboard the train. They both perceive the velocity of the train differently. Is that “subjective”? No, because if they both carried radar guns to record that velocity, they would materially record different values, and clearly a radar gun is not a conscious subject.
That is to say, the velocity of the train is materially realized differently between the two observers, but not because they are conscious observers, but because they are measuring it from two different contexts. That is to say, material reality obviously does realize itself in materially different ways under different contexts, and so it is no mystery that two different observers, experiencing reality under two different contexts, would not perceive exactly the same thing.
That is to say, material reality is context-dependent, but not observer-dependent. The observer does not perceive different things from another observer because they are an observer, but because they perceive them from different contexts, and reality is contextual. Indeed, if the radar gun was just left there without any observer there to record the results, but set on an automated mode to record it by itself, it would still record different values. It is therefore perfectly consistent to both say that what two observers perceive is directly equivalent to reality, but that reality is also observer-independent, because the contextual nature of reality is ultimately more fundamental than the observer.
(Reality is not purely contextual. If everything we perceived was contextual, then there would be nothing that connects my perspective to yours in a coherent framework. There are some properties which are non-contextual. The person aboard the train who measured the velocity to be zero with their radar gun would not be surprised to find that the person outside the train measured it to have a non-zero value, because they could predict that with a Galilean transformation. This transformation is only possible because some quantities in Galilean relativity are non-contextual, like relative velocities.)
Another common Chalmerite talking point is that your brain plays a role in what you perceive and so what you perceive cannot be material reality, but that argument only works if you believe the brain has the magical powers to create something immaterial. What role your brain plays in what you perceive, the brain is still a material object, and those roles are still material processes, and so your perception is still an emergent phenomenon of underlying material processes, and thus is still material.
The idea that material reality is something invisible is also a silly notion. It confuses the map for the territory. Mathematics is just a language, and as a language, it is used to describe things, particularly, it is a language constructed for the purpose of describing material reality.
The description is never the same thing as what it is describing. They are always categorically different. There is no “gulf” that separates the two, which implies some distance between them, and that having a better description of something narrows that “gulf.” That’s nonsense. A description is just categorically a different kind of thing to what it is describing. No sufficiently detailed scientific description of fire will ever cause the paper it is written upon to suddenly burst into flames and become a real fire. That is nonsense.
Mathematical models are never material reality. They are descriptions of material reality. Material reality is the thing you are already immersed in everyday, that surrounds you, where your real family members and loved ones reside, where you perform real labor, where you conduct real experiments in the real world. It is not in the mathematical abstractions, or any other kind of abstractions.
Anyways, rant over. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Seems like a reasonable thesis. As someone not too familiar with the philosophy part of cognitive science (or rather, not too familiar with non-materialist parts), how does Chalmerism incorporate dialectics/entropy as part of the model of consciousness? If consciousness is not a derivative of matter but something distinct, what makes it non-static?
The so-called “hard problem of consciousness” really is not a genuine “problem” in the sense of something in search of a solution. The philosophers who put it forward do so as an argument to justify dualism. They don’t want the “problem” to be solved because then it would disprove their dualism. Chalmers himself is openly a self-described dualist and denies materialism. So, Chalmerites typically don’t propose actual solutions.
In my view, it is not a genuine “problem” to be solved to begin with, because it arises from premises which are inherently dualistic. You have to begin with the assumption that what we perceive is not material reality to derive it, and that’s already a dualistic starting point, and you’ll never recover monism in that framework without contradicting yourself. It’s less of a “problem” but more of a proof-by-contradiction that such a starting point makes no sense in a monist framework.
Of course, if what we perceive has no connection to the underlying material reality, then that opens the question of how the two can come to agree. Most dualists historically have been religious and so they just say “God did it.” But Chalmers succeeded in popularizing dualism among secular crowds by trying to give a secular argument in favor of dualism, and thus his proposed “solution” is also secular in construction, and it’s basically just panpsychism.
Panpsychism is a kind of dualism where the mind-body duality is not a property specific to human beings with “souls” but is a property that could even be said to exist of an individual particle, that even an individual particle has a “consciousness,” and that humans have “consciousness” because they are composed of a lot of tiny things which possess one. Panpsychism, in my opinion, has never made any logical sense because of the combination problem.
In my view, since I take what we perceive to be material reality, then the gulf between what Chalmers calls “physical reality and subjective experience” does not actually exist, and it is really just the categorical difference between a description of reality and reality itself, which is not a “gulf” that can be bridged because they are categorically distinct things. No description of reality will reproduce reality in the same sense that no sufficiently detailed description of fire will suddenly cause the paper it is written upon to burst into flames and become a real, tangible, perceptible fire, with real brightness and warmth.
Panpsychism does not make sense because they, in my language, are basically presupposing that each individual particle carries with it a tiny piece of “reality,” but they could never actually formalize that because to formalize it is describe it, and to describe it is to already move outside of reality to a categorically distinct description of reality. Since the description can never carry reality with it, such a model would be logically impossible to formalize.
To move away from my language and into Chalmerite language, by presupposing that each particle carries with it a tiny piece of “consciousness,” well, if they were to try and formalize that into a mathematical model, now they are just writing down numbers governed by laws, and so if a bunch of particles come together to form a human brain, they now have a theory with a lot of numbers in one place, but that does not give them their “consciousness.” There would still be a “disconnect” between a theory that says there’s a bunch of numbers in this location, and what we actually experience.
Any attempt to formalize panpsychism into an actual scientific model will end up reproducing the exact same “hard problem of consciousness,” and so it can only exist as a vague, abstract, ill-defined idea, because it is not coherent. The issue is, again, in my view, because the very basis of the “hard problem of consciousness” is fallacious to begin with, and so it is not something that can even meaningfully be “solved.” It can only be dissolved by changing your premises.
If the word “consciousness” were to mean anything at all, clearly it should be associated with things like self-awareness, intelligence, cognition, etc. But Chalmers strips all of those out in his definition and just claims “consciousness” is what is directly observed prior to anyone becoming aware of it or applying any sort of cognition to it. He, thus, bizarrely, operates on a definition of “consciousness” that incorporates nothing of what the average person would associate with consciousness, and is directly equivalent to what the average person would just call reality.
(Indeed, this is where the idealist comes in: because they have redefined consciousness to just be “reality,” they use their redefinition as proof that reality is fundamentally “consciousness.” The issue, however, is that the idealist stripped out everything we’d normally associate with “consciousness” to make that argument, so, even if we take that argument seriously, they then cannot start to assign reality mental properties like awareness, intelligence, cognition, etc, because they stripped all of those out in their definition to make the argument, so it wouldn’t follow from the argument. However, once idealists have convinced you that reality is “consciousness” with their word games, they will then start to quietly bring those properties back, to start talking about reality as if it is a big cognitive mind, using the implications of that word to bring in further claims from the back door that did not stem from their original argument.)
Ah so it is a kind of atomic reductionist argument – interesting!
Maybe you can argue it isn’t a real problem for those specific people, but it is still unclear outside of that what exactly it is that’s giving birth to what people call consciousness and what it looks like as a process beyond self-reporting.
I mean, if you tell me that an image of an elephant popped into your head just now, I have to take your word for it. There is no way for me to observe/measure your internal visualizations to verify what you said. Whether we call it subjective experience or something else, the fact remains that it’s a part of us that is hard to measure and communicate about. Language tries to do this, but can only approximate.