"Even when I was studying mathematics, physics, and computer science, it always seemed that the problem of consciousness was about the most interesting problem out there for science to come to grips with"
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A working scientist’s confession disguised as a philosopher’s pitch: consciousness is the problem that refuses to stay in its lane. Chalmers frames the line with résumé-friendly credibility - math, physics, computer science - the holy trinity of “hard” disciplines. That setup is doing strategic work. It signals he didn’t arrive at mind and experience by drifting away from rigor; he arrived there because rigor kept bumping into a wall it couldn’t neatly formalize.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of scientific comfort zones. In fields where progress is often measured in clean models and scalable solutions, consciousness is the irritant that won’t behave like an engineering task. You can map neurons, simulate learning, optimize prediction - and still not touch the felt reality of being. Chalmers is pointing to the gap between explaining functions (what the brain does) and explaining experience (what it’s like), a distinction that would later harden into his “hard problem” branding. The line isn’t just autobiographical; it’s recruitment: if you care about big, foundational puzzles, this is the one that keeps surviving every methodological upgrade.
Context matters: Chalmers comes of age during the rise of computationalism and cognitive science’s confidence boom, when “mind as information processing” started to look like an all-purpose key. His sentence acknowledges that power while refusing its triumphalism. It’s a reminder that the most sophisticated tools we have can still leave the central datum - subjective experience - oddly untouched, like a pixel you can’t unsee once you notice it.
The subtext is a quiet indictment of scientific comfort zones. In fields where progress is often measured in clean models and scalable solutions, consciousness is the irritant that won’t behave like an engineering task. You can map neurons, simulate learning, optimize prediction - and still not touch the felt reality of being. Chalmers is pointing to the gap between explaining functions (what the brain does) and explaining experience (what it’s like), a distinction that would later harden into his “hard problem” branding. The line isn’t just autobiographical; it’s recruitment: if you care about big, foundational puzzles, this is the one that keeps surviving every methodological upgrade.
Context matters: Chalmers comes of age during the rise of computationalism and cognitive science’s confidence boom, when “mind as information processing” started to look like an all-purpose key. His sentence acknowledges that power while refusing its triumphalism. It’s a reminder that the most sophisticated tools we have can still leave the central datum - subjective experience - oddly untouched, like a pixel you can’t unsee once you notice it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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