A Re-evaluation of Chalmers's Distinction — Epoche B2
Beyond the Hard Problem: A Re-evaluation of Chalmers's Distinction David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind (1996 [1] ) gave the philosophy of mind a vocabulary it still uses. The distinction between the easy problems of consciousness and the hard problem is now so familiar that it is often treated as a datum rather than as a thesis. This review argues that it is a thesis, and that its load is carried by a claim about concepts rather than a claim about consciousness. Seeing that changes where an objection should be aimed. In particular, it explains why one very tempting line of reply — that phenomenal experience does real work in the mind, so the gap between the phenomenal and the functional is softer than Chalmers allows — leaves his argument untouched [2] , while a less obvious reply, about how we think about our own experiences, engages it directly. What the distinction says Start with the terms. Phenomenal consciousness is the felt, qualitative side of a mental state: what it is like, from the inside, to undergo it. Thomas Nagel fixed the phrase in 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat [3] ?' (1974), where he wrote that an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. Drink a bowl of matcha: the bitterness and the grassy sweetness have a character that a description of your tongue does not obviously capture. Those characters are the qualia . A function , in the relevant sense, is a causal role: what a state is caused by and what it in turn causes. Functionalism is the view that mental states just are states occupying such roles. Pain, on this view, is whatever state is typically caused by injury and typically causes withdrawal, wincing and the belief that one is hurt. Chalmers's easy problems are the problems of explaining functions [4] : discrimination, integration of information, reportability, the focus of attention, the control of behaviour. They are called easy not because they are simple but because we know what would count as solving them. Specify a mechanism that performs the function, and the explanatory work is done. The hard problem is the question why the performance of any such function should be accompanied by experience at all. As Chalmers put it in 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness' (1995), it is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Where the problem came from The 1996 book is best read as the third step in a sequence. Nagel's 1974 paper made the point that an objective, third-personal science seems to leave out a subjective point of view. Joseph Levine's 'Materialism and Qualia [5] : The Explanatory Gap' (1983) sharpened it into a claim about explanation. Levine granted, for the sake of argument, that pain is identical to a brain state, and observed that the identity still leaves something unexplained. 'Water is H2O' explains the behaviour of water; 'pain is C-fibre firing', even if true, explains nothing about why that firing hurts. Levine's gap is epistemic: it concerns what we can understand, not what exists. Chalmers's contribution was to argue that the epistemic gap has an ontological consequence. The argument runs through conceivability. A philosophical zombie is a being physically identical to a conscious person [6] , functioning in exactly the same way, but with no experience at all. Chalmers holds that such a being is coherently conceivable, that this conceivability is good evidence of genuine possibility, and that if a zombie world is possible then the physical facts do not necessitate the phenomenal facts. Physicalism — the view that everything is fixed by the physical facts — would then be false. The tempting reply that does not work A natural response is to say that the distinction between the phenomenal and the functional has been drawn too sharply. Phenomenal experience, the thought runs, is not an inert extra that sits on top of processing. The unpleasantness of pain is what makes you attend to the injury; the felt quality of fear is what recruits and organises your response. So phenomenal character has a job. If it has a job, the phenomenal and the functional are interwoven, and the gap between them is a difference of perspective rather than a chasm. Every step of that is plausible, and none of it touches Chalmers's argument. He does not claim that consciousness is causally idle. He explicitly rejects epiphenomenalism as a comfortable position, and he defends a principle of organisational invariance, according to which any system with the same fine-grained functional organisation as a conscious being has the same experiences. His view is compatible with the felt quality of pain being deeply involved in what pain does. The reason the reply misses is that it answers a different question. Chalmers's question is not whether phenomenal states have effects. It is whether a complete specification of the functions leaves the phenomenal facts open. Saying that experience performs a function tells us what experience does; it does not tell us why performing that function should feel like anything. A zombie, by construction, performs the function without the feel. To rebut Chalmers one must show that the zombie description is incoherent, or that its coherence does not imply possibility. Asserting that experience is useful does neither. The same complaint applies to the phrase 'phenomenal experience has an epistemic role', which is often used at this point. It can mean that experience gives us information about the world, which no one denies; or that experience gives us a distinctive kind of knowledge of itself, which is a substantive claim. Left unspecified, it looks like a concession that Chalmers can accept without loss. The reply that does engage: phenomenal concepts There is a better place to push. Chalmers's argument needs the conceivability of zombies to be evidence of their possibility. That inference fails in famili