Physicalism and Experience

Edited by Abraham Tenang

Abstract

In "Facing Up to The Problem of Consciousness" (1995), David Chalmers argues that the existence of consciousness, by which he means experience (the term I will use hereafter), makes physicalism impossible and forces us to conclude that experience is a fundamental property of the world and some form of dualism is true. In his view, there is an explanatory gap between the physical and the experiential, and experience must be fundamental. He begins his argument by distinguishing the easy problem(s) of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problems consist of scientific problems, i.e., those that scientific methods can solve. This category includes questions such as what differentiates being awake from being asleep, our ability to access and report on our internal states, etc. These problems deal fundamentally with how we behave externally. Therefore, we can answer these questions by observing behaviour, developing predictive, testable theories which explain the observed behaviour and conducting experiments which test the predictions made by the available theories.