|
8aa0427
|
Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can proc..
|
|
|
David J. Chalmers |
|
b4ff383
|
Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.
|
|
|
David J. Chalmers |
|
4fe6182
|
Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from lumpy gray matter? We know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far ..
|
|
|
David J. Chalmers |
|
bfc99db
|
The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as "the subjective quality of experience." When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experien..
|
|
|
David J. Chalmers |