David Chalmers is one of the most influential philosophers to challenge how we think about consciousness. Here he is in a fascinating TED Talk explaining his ideas. If you're unfamiliar with Chalmers, I strongly suggest taking the time to hear it. He's an unusually clear and engaging speaker, and his articulation of the 'Hard Problem of Consciousness' is very good.
I'd like to highlight a few key points that he makes in this talk. He begins by noting that "there's nothing we know more directly...but at the same time it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe." He adds that consciousness is also extremely important- it is what gives value and meaning to everything we have. But all our scientific understanding has not provided us with a satisfactory answer to such questions as 'What is consciousness?' and 'Why are we conscious?"
He goes on to note that there are problems with all of the reductionistic and physicalist explanations of consciousness. Neuroscience has given us abundant information about the correlations between the processes of the brain and our awareness, but no true explanations of the cause of our subjective experience. Explanations of emergence also fall short.
At about the 8:00 mark, Chalmers says "Consciousness is a kind of anomaly." In other words, consciousness just doesn't seem to fit with our best scientific understanding, grounded in the laws of physics. He suggests that in order to make progress, we need to consider radical ideas (maybe several radical ideals). One radical idea he offers is that consciousness may be in some sense fundamental, like mass or time. That is, it's not something that simply arises with the right combination of particles. In some sense it may be a basic constituent of our reality. A second idea he offers is that "consciousness might universal." In other words everything, even rocks or thermostats, is, at least at a rudimentary level, conscious.
It's here that I would like to jump in and suggest a crazy idea that to me isn't really so crazy. Chalmers's bold claim that "consciousness is a kind of anomaly" has an interesting implication: are there any data that confirm the anomalous nature of consciousness apart from our own experience? After all, if we're serious about wanting to integrate consciousness into our scientific understanding, it should be obvious that we should inquire as to exactly how it is anomalous. To do that we need to perform careful, laboratory controlled experiments designed to test how consciousness deviates with respect to the laws of physics. Chalmers's arguments are interesting and influential, but I think it will be difficult to bring about a radical understanding of consciousness without strong empirical foundation that demonstrates consciousness anomalies.
But wait! We already have such a literature. It's called psi. And there has been a good deal of research and published studies that document significant effects for a number of categories of psi. Dean Radin has posted a helpful website with links to much of this research.
I spoke briefly to Chalmers at the recent Science of Consciousness Conference in Tuscon. He didn't appear that interested in pursuing psi at the moment, which may not exactly be consistent with the approaches he is favoring. However, his co-organizer of the conference, Stuart Hameroff (and co-author with Roger Penrose on a theory of consciousness involving quantum computing within the brain) is indeed very open to this prospect. As the conference was drawing to a close, Hameroff predicted that psi will soon be embraced by scientists and philosophers studying consciousness.
For me, the 'hard problem of consciousness' really does require that we open our minds a bit toward new ways of thinking about consciousness. And further, given that we have no theory of consciousness truly grounded in the laws of physics as we understand them, there is no justification to ignore data that surprises us or appears not to fit with our notions about our world. Indeed, such results might suggest we're on the right track.
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