Does Consciousness Alone Truly Exist?
In his 1995 paper, Australian philosopher David Chalmers formulated what he called the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”.
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience.
According to Chalmers, the “easier” problems such as the ability to categorize objects, observation of internal states, the direction of attention, etc. were explainable within the framework of physicalism — as the result of entirely physical processes. Recent advances in artificial intelligence research, particularly with the advent of neural networks, have shown that this is mostly accurate. The “hard” problem of subjective experience, however, can not be explained materialistically.
This point is also illustrated by the philosophical zombie (p-zombie) thought experiment. A p-zombie looks and acts like a regular human being but has no inner subjective experience. It will laugh at your jokes, scream out when hit and maybe have long discussions on the philosophy of mind. But, there would be no inner subject to any of its experiences. As computers get better at performing tasks that were traditionally considered…
