"Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes"
About this Quote
Chalmers signals two commitments at once: a deep respect for empirical work on the mind and a refusal to collapse consciousness into neural or cognitive mechanisms. He is famous for distinguishing the easy problems of consciousness, which concern functions like attention, report, and control, from the hard problem, which asks why and how experience feels like anything from the inside. The line about not trying to reduce reflects his view that even a complete map from brain processes to behavior and information flow would leave a residual question about subjective feel, or qualia.
That stance is not anti-science. It welcomes and depends on neuroscience and psychology that identify neural correlates of consciousness, chart cognitive architectures, and model attention, memory, and report. Such work reveals systematic links between brain states and experiences and can even yield predictive, testable laws. What it does not do, in his view, is show that phenomenal experience just is a neural or computational state in the way water just is H2O. There remains an explanatory gap between third-person structure and first-person feel.
Chalmers frames this as methodological compatibility. Scientists can proceed by correlating and modeling, refining measures of awareness, and building theories like global workspace or higher-order thought. Philosophers can ask whether those theories capture consciousness itself or only its functional accompaniments. On his picture, a mature science might include bridging principles or psychophysical laws that connect physical structures with experiential qualities without deriving the latter from the former.
The broader context is his naturalistic nonreductive view: consciousness is real and lawfully related to brain processes but not identical to them. That position preserves the value of ongoing empirical research while cautioning against premature reductionism. It invites a two-perspective approach, where first-person phenomenology and third-person neuroscience jointly constrain theory, keeping open space for novel frameworks without abandoning scientific rigor.
That stance is not anti-science. It welcomes and depends on neuroscience and psychology that identify neural correlates of consciousness, chart cognitive architectures, and model attention, memory, and report. Such work reveals systematic links between brain states and experiences and can even yield predictive, testable laws. What it does not do, in his view, is show that phenomenal experience just is a neural or computational state in the way water just is H2O. There remains an explanatory gap between third-person structure and first-person feel.
Chalmers frames this as methodological compatibility. Scientists can proceed by correlating and modeling, refining measures of awareness, and building theories like global workspace or higher-order thought. Philosophers can ask whether those theories capture consciousness itself or only its functional accompaniments. On his picture, a mature science might include bridging principles or psychophysical laws that connect physical structures with experiential qualities without deriving the latter from the former.
The broader context is his naturalistic nonreductive view: consciousness is real and lawfully related to brain processes but not identical to them. That position preserves the value of ongoing empirical research while cautioning against premature reductionism. It invites a two-perspective approach, where first-person phenomenology and third-person neuroscience jointly constrain theory, keeping open space for novel frameworks without abandoning scientific rigor.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by David
Add to List
