Consciousness By David Chalmers

Our focus in this work shall be to describe and evaluate David Chalmers’ theory of consciousness. We shall begin this task by briefly acquainting ourselves with the biography of this contemporary genius.
BIOGRAPHY OF DAVID CHALMERS
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher. He was born on April 20, 1966. He received his undergraduate degree in pure mathematics from the University of Adelaide in Australia and continued his studies at the University of Oxford. Chalmers received his PhD in philosophy and cognitive science from Indiana University Bloomington. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program directed by Andy Clark at Washington University in St. Louis from 1993 to 1995, and his first professorship was at UC Santa Cruz, from August 1995 to December 1998. Chalmers was subsequently appointed Professor of Philosophy (1999–2004) and, later, Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies (2002–2004) at the University of Arizona, sponsor of the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference.
He has authored a number of books like The Conscious Mind (1996), and The Character of Consciousness (2010). Furthermore, Chalmers is an editor on topics in the philosophy of mind for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
CHALMERS’ THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
What is Consciousness?
Chalmers holds that anyone who has thought seriously about consciousness will consider it in the following ways; first, it is an intangible reality, this means that it is not physical or spatial. Second, that it is a fundamental phenomenon of our individual existence. By this, he means that a man’s consciousness is a fact he knows of more directly and more vividly than anything else. Chalmers further believes that consciousness though is the most familiar and vivid thing in the universe; it is also the most mysterious thing in the universe (Conscious Mind 3, 4).
Despite the aforementioned characterizations of consciousness, Chalmers is convinced that various existing definitions of consciousness are quite insufficient. He asserted that “... it can be frustratingly diaphanous: in talking about conscious experience, it is notoriously difficult to pin down the subject matter” (3). This means that consciousness is elusive in character. Some hold it to be wakefulness or awareness of something, but Chalmers prefers to call it the subjective quality of experience of what it is like to be a cognitive agent (6). However, we find Chalmers attempted description of consciousness in a TED Talk in March 2014 quite useful. He likened consciousness to an inner movie playing in every person. He stated:
Right now you have a movie playing inside your head. It is an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you are seeing and hearing right now, but that is just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. It has emotions, anger, and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world.
In sum, consciousness is the totality of our subjective experience. Its occurrence within us is like a stream steadily flowing inside us or like a movie in all its magnificence, playing inside us.
Problems of Consciousness
In Philosophy of Mind, the problem of consciousness is divided into two, namely; the easy problems and the hard problems of consciousness. David Chalmers is notable to have specialized in the hard problems of consciousness, for he believes, as he stated at TED, that they pose more serious questions at the heart of our study of consciousness.
To be precise, the easy problems deal with the explanation for phenomena like:
the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli
the integration of information by a cognitive system
the reportability of mental states
the ability of a system to access its own internal states
the focus of attention
the deliberate control of behaviour
the difference between wakefulness and sleep (Chalmers, Character 4).
This easy problem of consciousness is alternatively called the functional explanation of consciousness (6). This is because it concerns itself with accounting for which parts of the brain or neural mechanism is responsible for certain cognitive abilities and functions.  It is a theory of correlation which focuses on what certain areas of the brain do and which conscious experience they correlate with. For instance, they analyse certain parts of the brain which are responsible for feeling happy, sad, stressed, et.c. Hence, Chalmers holds that the easy problems are scientific problems and that they do not address the central issues. “If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem,” he stated (5).
On the other hand, Chalmers averred that “if any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one” (5). That is, the hard problem of consciousness. The problem is precisely the problem of experience. For Chalmers, the easy problems are easy because they explain function, while the hard problems are hard because they are not about functions; they are the “why” questions which persist after functions are explained. They are the mysterious questions about consciousness. The hard problem deal with the question of why the physical processes of the brain should be accompanied by consciousness or subjective experience at all? That is, why is there this inner subjective movie? Why are we not robots, taking in inputs or information and giving outputs without experiencing this inner subjective movie? In sum, why is there consciousness at all?  Chalmers opines that the central thing to consciousness is the “subjective aspect of experience,” that is that “an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here.” Then he asks; “It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does” (5).
The Impossibility of a Science of Consciousness
What Chalmers seeks to clarify here is that the phenomenon referred as consciousness is a kind of being that cannot be reduced to materiality, hence, it its study is not within the scope of the empirical sciences. To be sure, the easy problems could be resolved within the sciences like Psychology and Neuroscience, but the hard problem which raises the serious questions according to him, is not within the reach of the empirical sciences but philosophy. He believes the empirical sciences offer a “reductive explanation,” while philosophy offers a “non-reductive explanation” of consciousness and that there is an “explanatory gap” between the physical properties and our mind’s qualia (Character 6-19).
David argues that science deals with objective objects but consciousness is a subjective phenomenon, hence, there can never be a science of consciousness. This means that the questions of objective function can be applied to the brain but not to consciousness.

The Central Themes of Chalmers’ Standpoint on the Hard Problem of Consciousness
We have noted that Chalmers considers the hard problem the only serious problem of consciousness, and he has contributed immensely towards the resolution of this problem. Though, he is criticized by philosophers like Dan Dennet, who believe in the illusion of the hard problem. Dennet argues that the explanation for functions and behaviours is all there is to explain about consciousness. But Chalmers is of the opinion that Dennet’s claims deny the datum of the reality of consciousness. Still in the aforementioned TED Talk, he stated that consciousness is presently an anomaly and only “radical” or “crazy” ideas can help us integrate it into our world view.
His first idea about consciousness is that it is fundamental or foundational to reality. He postulates that just as space, time and mass are fundamental or basic building blocks for Physics, so is consciousness basic to reality and philosophy. From this, he holds that just as the physicists study the fundamental laws governing these existing fundamentals, so philosophers have the task to study fundamental laws consciousness or the laws that connect it to other fundamentals and physical processes.         
His second idea is termed “panpsychism.” “Pan” means all, and “psyche” means mind or soul. By this, Chalmers postulates that consciousness is universal; that every system or being might have some degree of consciousness. He holds that consciousness is common not only to humans but to animals, non living things, invisible particles, protons, electrons, et al. He further explained that it is not as if non living things or animals can think, reflect or are intelligent, but that they could have some primitive precursor to consciousness; that is, some elements of raw subjective feeling.
Arguments for Panpsychism
If consciousness is fundamental, then, it is universal to all things.
Some cultures hold that the human mind is continuous with nature.
Giulio Tononi’s mathematical theory of the “phi”: “Phi” is the mathematical measure of information integration in beings. Tononi holds that “phi” goes along with consciousness, that is that beings with higher “phi” have higher consciousness and vice versa. He also adds that the lower we go in the grade of being, the smaller the amount of “phi”, but we can never reach a point of non-zero degree of consciousness.
EVALUATION
Consciousness is among the catalogue of phenomena that we can know their “thatness” but not their “whatness”. Others include dark energy and background radiation of the big bang theory, protons, energy, infrared, gravity, time, being, et.c.
Even Chalmers agrees that in a sense, consciousness is synonymous to awareness, but for him, the former is more “loaded”. It is the subjective quality of experience, or “what it is like to be a cognitive agent” (Conscious Mind 6). Therefore, consciousness is essentially about rationality and contemplation. Its Latin etymology is “con” which means “with or together” and “scire” which means “to know.” 
The ethical implications: since our cultures do not permit us to eat something conscious, we therefore have to develop a new dietary ethics for our meals because all foods are also conscious. Additionally, we need to develop the ethics of creating and handling inanimate things like technological appliances, for instance, we need to be moral about how we switch them on and off.
The census of consciousness within a being: in complex beings like man or animals that have a galaxy of cells in them, how “many consciousnesses” will he have since all the cells are as well conscious?
How does Sigmund Freud’s psychological theory of the unconscious fit into Chalmers’ theory?
At TED, Chalmers expressed greater confidence at the fundamental character of consciousness, than at Panpsychism. We agree with him on this point. We also insist that consciousness is not a crazy thing that it will need a crazy idea to decipher.

WORK CITED
Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Chalmers, David. The Character of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
“TED.” The Hard Problem of Consciousness. July 2, 2014. May 19, 2017. blog.ted.com/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-david-chalmers-at-ted2014/.