The Hard Problem and the Case for a Conscious Universe: David Chalmers on Consciousness

Chalmers begins by pinning down the word. The kind of consciousness he cares about is subjective experience: what it feels like from the inside to be a human being or any other conscious creature. Right now he has visual images, the sound of his own voice, some emotional tone and a stream of thoughts, all experienced from a first-person point of view.

He allows that the common "inner movie" metaphor is imperfect, since experience is not like a movie in every way, though it is certainly rich. Philosophers sometimes use the word qualia for the specific qualities of experience, such as the redness of red versus the greenness of green, a particular taste or smell, or the character of pain. Consciousness is bigger than that, he notes, and includes thinking about your hometown or what you will do later.

Chalmers also separates several senses of the term. Access consciousness is being able to use information in your mind, and reflective consciousness is being able to think about yourself. The really mysterious one, the one that gets people going, is phenomenal consciousness: the fact that all of this feels like something at all.

The hard problem, as Chalmers states it, is why there is phenomenal consciousness at all and how physical processes in a brain could produce subjective experience. On its face, we have a big complicated physical system running, and nothing about that obviously requires an inner life, yet we do have one. Nobody has been able to build a machine where a light goes on to say it is conscious.

Lex Fridman notes that humans do create consciousness every so often, in the form of babies, and wonders whether watching that process might help. Chalmers agrees that brains clearly produce consciousness but says that does not explain why. Even if AI systems one day turn out to be conscious, the hard problem would remain, just as it does with babies.

The baby example leads into the question of where consciousness begins. Chalmers recalls that some people once believed newborns could not feel pain, which is why anesthetics were withheld during circumcision, a view now seen as cruel. He says his partner works on consciousness in babies and thinks newborns arrive with some degree of it, a question that extends backward to fetuses and into politically controversial territory.

The same question runs across the animal kingdom. Chalmers observes that people have grown more liberal over time about ascribing consciousness: once perhaps only mammals, now most accept fish, and the argument is about insects. Some even say plants have a degree of consciousness, and the far end of that chain is the view that every physical system has some.

That far end is panpsychism, which Chalmers says he takes seriously. His argument starts from the way physics treats certain things as fundamental, such as space, time, mass and charge, which are not reduced to anything simpler. When Maxwell could not explain electromagnetism in terms of the existing fundamentals, he took charge as a new one, and Chalmers thinks something similar could happen with consciousness.

The motivation is a gap between kinds of problem. Physics gives us structure and dynamics, how things behave and what observable behavior they produce, which is great for the "easy problems" of explaining how we walk and talk. The hard problem is about subjective experience, and it does not look like a problem about structure or dynamics, so existing physics seems unlikely to give a full explanation.

Fridman pushes back that a conscious atom is hard to imagine, while a conscious ant or even a plant feels more understandable because they have agency, are born and die. He adds that a physical robot like a Roomba can seem to have some agency, which is easier to accept than a neural network running as software. Saying consciousness is a fundamental property of reality is, to him, a much bigger statement, and it would mean we understand almost nothing about that aspect of the world.

Asked how reality would look with consciousness at its core, Chalmers first notes that adding consciousness is not the only move. Perhaps we add something else, a proto-consciousness or "X", so that space-time and mass plus X somehow give rise to consciousness. He calls this panprotopsychism, and says we should stay open to it even if we cannot imagine how X yields experience.

For genuine consciousness at the bottom level, he leans on an old worry about physics: it tells us how particles relate to and interact with other particles, but not what a particle is in itself. One view is that the intrinsic nature of a particle is mental, so each is a tiny conscious subject whose experience mirrors its mass, charge and velocity. On this picture a Newtonian world would be a vast collection of little conscious subjects, far simpler than us and without free will or rationality.

Quantum mechanics changes the picture. If the universe is ultimately one big wave function, the corresponding view might be a single conscious mind whose structure matches that of the wave function, which some call cosmopsychism. Chalmers stresses that this is extremely speculative, with no direct evidence and no particular reason to think it correct, but calls it an exciting and beautiful possibility, a giant cosmic mind rich enough to replicate the structure of physics.

Chalmers points out that the pull toward these ideas is not purely philosophical. Some neuroscientists are beginning to take panpsychism seriously, for example through integrated information theory. He mentions Christof Koch's new book, *The Feeling of Life Itself*, which holds that consciousness is widespread but cannot be computed, and that even very simple systems like a couple of particles have some degree of it.

He cautions that this is very controversial and that the science of consciousness is in very early days. When Fridman asks about Alan Watts's line that through our eyes the universe perceives itself, Chalmers says it works best if you are not a panpsychist or cosmopsychist. On those views the universe was conscious all along and did not need us, and we are just more complex forms of an existing consciousness.

The orthodox view, he says, is that consciousness belongs to humans, many non-human animals and perhaps future AIs. Panpsychism is held by a small minority of theorists, though it has grown popular over the last decade, especially among younger people, and many still find it, in his words, "totally batshit crazy". On the orthodox picture consciousness arrived at some point in cosmic history, and since many people think consciousness is what gives life meaning and value, its arrival turned a meaningless universe into a meaningful one.

Chalmers closes by considering a teleological reading, in which the universe was evolving toward consciousness all along. He cites his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel, whose book *Mind and Cosmos* argued for this view as a problem for Darwinism. Most people did not agree and Chalmers does not either, but he finds it at least a beautiful speculative picture of the cosmos.