Event · Knowledge · 1994 / 1995
The Hard Part
In a Tucson hotel a philosopher tells a room of scientists that the functions are the easy work. Experience is what remains.
- Tucson, Arizona
- Late twentieth-century science of mind
- 32.22°N 110.97°W
Plate · Generated interpretation
The functions can be listed. What still feels leftover?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
April 1994, Toward a Science of Consciousness, Tucson. David Chalmers separates easy problems of consciousness (discrimination, report, wakefulness) from a hard problem: why those functions are accompanied by experience. Published as “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1995).
Chalmers 1995, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200–219, recording the 1994 Tucson talk. The Conscious Mind (1996) expands it. “Hard problem” is his coinage here.
The easy problems are still science. They are easy only by contrast. The hard problem is not which neuron fires. It is why there is something it is like. Dennett and others deny the contrast. That denial is a position.
This is not a proof that physics is incomplete. It is a claim about what would remain unexplained if the functions were mapped. Nagel’s bat is a neighbor, not the same paper.
Whether the leftover is a fact, a trick of the question, or a name for ignorance is not settled in Tucson.
Distant echoes
Echo
Late analytic philosophy · Princeton, on the page of *The Philosophical Review*
What is it like to be a bat?
Nagel asked the like. Chalmers asked why the like remains when the functions are done.
One question remains
Knowledge · What counts as knowing?
If every function were explained, what, if anything, would still be missing, and who would notice the gap?