"There's certainly nothing original about the observation that conscious experience poses a hard problem"
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Chalmers opens with a shrug that’s doing real work. By insisting there’s “certainly nothing original” in noticing the “hard problem” of consciousness, he disarms the reader before he escalates the stakes. It’s a classic philosopher’s feint: modesty as a way to claim authority. The subtext is, You’ve heard this complaint before, but you still don’t have an answer. The boredom is strategic; it frames the predicament as stubborn, not trendy.
The phrasing also signals a boundary-policing move in late-20th-century philosophy of mind. “Conscious experience” isn’t cognition, behavior, or information processing - the respectable, modelable stuff. It’s the first-person “what it’s like,” the felt texture that refuses to sit neatly inside third-person science. Calling it a “hard problem” (Chalmers’ signature term from the mid-1990s) is a rhetorical gambit: it separates questions we can plausibly solve with neural mechanisms (attention, reportability, discrimination) from the question that seems to survive every successful explanation. Even if neuroscience maps every circuit, why should that mapping be accompanied by experience at all?
The line’s quiet cynicism is aimed at reductionist confidence. If the observation is unoriginal, then novelty isn’t the metric; adequacy is. Chalmers is also positioning himself against a certain academic fashion: the tendency to rebrand the mystery as a misunderstanding. He’s reminding the field that the problem isn’t a gap in data, but a gap in intelligibility - and that treating it as solved by better imaging is, at best, premature.
The phrasing also signals a boundary-policing move in late-20th-century philosophy of mind. “Conscious experience” isn’t cognition, behavior, or information processing - the respectable, modelable stuff. It’s the first-person “what it’s like,” the felt texture that refuses to sit neatly inside third-person science. Calling it a “hard problem” (Chalmers’ signature term from the mid-1990s) is a rhetorical gambit: it separates questions we can plausibly solve with neural mechanisms (attention, reportability, discrimination) from the question that seems to survive every successful explanation. Even if neuroscience maps every circuit, why should that mapping be accompanied by experience at all?
The line’s quiet cynicism is aimed at reductionist confidence. If the observation is unoriginal, then novelty isn’t the metric; adequacy is. Chalmers is also positioning himself against a certain academic fashion: the tendency to rebrand the mystery as a misunderstanding. He’s reminding the field that the problem isn’t a gap in data, but a gap in intelligibility - and that treating it as solved by better imaging is, at best, premature.
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| Topic | Deep |
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