Where Chalmers is mistaken regarding “the Hard Problem” of consciousness

 By Mathew Goldstein

Philosopher Massimo Pigluicci recently commented on two mistakes found in Philosopher David Chalmers arguments for consciousness being a uniquely hard problem that is resistant to scientific explanation. The article, The Hard Problem is a category mistake, is partially restricted to subscribers. Chalmers claims unconscious human zombies must be possible merely because they are conceivable and he also claims that attempts to explain how consciousness manifests itself will be incomplete as long as such explanations fail to also explain how consciousness is experienced. 

Pigluicci points out that it is conceivable that a circle can be converted into a square encompassing the same area as the circle. However, the number corresponding to the area of a circle always includes a transcendent value, pi, while the number representing the area of square contains no transcendent number. So what is conceivable is not therefore what is also possible. Now it needs to be said here that the recent progress in computer artificial intelligence arguably provides more credence to philosophical zombies being a possibility.

Furthermore, it is generally true that “a description of anything is not the same thing as the thing described…. This is not a special problem about consciousness, it is just what descriptions are. They are not the things they describe. The map, if you will, is not the territory, and to confuse the two is a serious error. To treat such a “gap” as evidence that the description is incomplete is to commit what [philosopher Gilbert] Ryle called a category mistake: demanding that an explanation do something that explanations are not in the business of doing.”

The phenomena of consciousness is more intertwined with the first person experience perspective than most other phenomena. This is a genuine complication. Yet consciousness also has observable implications and correlates. We need not be thwarted by philosophical zombies, or questions regarding what it is like to be a bat, when logically associating those observations with consciousness. This is because we know we share the same biology as a result of biological evolution so we can build our understanding of consciousness on that solid foundation.

Notice that this still leaves open the question of whether an intelligence that is not biological can be conscious. Richard Dawkins has been ridiculed for taking this possibility seriously. See A conversation between Dawkins and ChatGPT. His perspective is that the evolution that gave us conscious self-awareness works at the level of the gene. Consciousness is a product of information processing if we understand that the brain, together with the body, is an information processing machine. This perspective has merit regardless of how uncomfortable it may be for us. An understanding that AI relies on sophisticated pattern matching gives us reason to dismiss the conclusion that it is conscious regardless of any appearance to the contrary. Yet we cannot rule out that future technological advances could enable future AI to acquire consciousness. It could be difficult for remote AI users to recognize the difference between AI that is unconscious and AI that is conscious.