The Conscious Mind (David J. Chalmers)

 

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Question

David Chalmers's argument for panpsychism from the alleged irreducibility of experiential consciousness to physics, rather reminds me of St Anselm's Ontological Argument. It seems that, because Chalmers can conceive of a universe in which experiential consciousness does not supervene on the facts and laws of physics, and because at present no-one has any kind of plausible causal explanation, then we are necessarily forced into a kind of dualism, and strict materialism is refuted.

Would this be a fair characterisation of David Chalmers's position?

Gemini

Your characterization of David Chalmers's argument for panpsychism aligns with some key aspects of his position. Here's a breakdown of the similarities you identified:

• Irreducibility of Consciousness: Chalmers argues that consciousness, the "what it's like" of experience, cannot be fully explained by physical properties or processes alone. This parallels the ontological argument's claim that God's existence is irreducible to any other concept.
• Conceivability Argument: Both arguments hinge on the idea that we can conceive of an alternate reality where the key phenomenon exists independently. Chalmers imagines a universe with physically identical systems (‘philosophical zombies’) lacking consciousness, similar to Anselm's conception of a maximally great being that necessarily exists.

However, it's important to note that Chalmers's argument doesn't necessarily lead to a dualist position (mind and matter as separate substances). He proposes panpsychism (consciousness inherent in all things) as a solution to the mind-body problem.

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Comment

The book, like many semi-popular philosophy texts, is a dry reading experience in the parts where he's developing and defending his own philosophical position. Rather like attempting Proust.

When he's purely didactic, however, he's excellent: a justly-praised virtuoso essay at the end on the ways quantum theory could be interpreted (his imagination again fails him on the MWI); his compelling framing of what's wrong with Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment - a model of conceptual clarity.

But on the central question, how to understand how Standard Model matter can give rise to qualia like the subjective experiences of the colour 'red', or agonising pain, he's inclined to reject any kind of physicalist explanation on principle.

People talk about the 'God of the Gaps; Chalmers is proposing a 'Philosophy of the Gaps'. Recall that he wrote this book in the mid-1990s when GOFAI was running out of steam while Artificial Neural Net research (the precursor to LLMs) was limited to toy problems. 

With bio-realistic neural architectures computationally now in reach, I am optimistic that qualia can become a practical research topic.