Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now

A story and a challenge for the philosophically minded.

A Thesis Challenging the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers "Consciousness" Paradigm

Presented to the Fort Lewis College Philosophy Club in Durango

If you’ve plunged into the philosophical arena of human consciousness, I think we’d agree—if on nothing else—that the expert dialogue is a great big ball of confusion. After all, in a 2024 survey by Robert Kuhn, there are 325 competing philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. That’s not theories closing in on understanding; that’s 325 opinions that don’t convince any peers.

At the head of this ball of confusion is the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm, summed up in Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why and how do physical processes in the brain (neural activity) give rise to subjective experience? What is it like to be something? How does matter become thought?

Writer Marvin Von Renchler excellently summarizes the flaw in the Hard Problem: “Rather than demonstrate a separation between physical processes and subjective experience, it is assumed.”

Biologically, everything we observe points to continuity: increasingly complex systems of memory, integration and self-referential processing emerging stepwise under selection pressures. There is no clear place for something non-physical to be introduced.

Von Renchler concludes that, “The ‘hard problem’ is less an unsolved mystery and more a framing issue, a mismatch between philosophical categories and how evolved systems actually work.”

There’s another objection I’ve yet to receive a serious response to: Why search for our mind wholly within our brain in the first place?

To every thing, turn, turn. Who am I?

After more than six years of chewing on it, I’m looking forward to demoting my “Who Am I?” project to the way back burner and starting in on another one who's time has come. 

This Stephen Gould’s Missing Key, morphed into Is Belief In God Rational?, morphed into Who Am I? project was edifying and humbling, and yeah, I’m afraid disappointing.  I’m a born and bred child of the intellectual enlightenment, with engaged discussion in my DNA.  Seems that I may belong in a different world and time and with goals that make no sense to the current implosion into that MAGA, me, me, me, dog eat dog reality making the rounds.  

Thing is, I grew up in a home with table talk, and magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, National Geographic, two encyclopedia sets, the big Webster Dictionary that needed it’s own stand, plus …, all that in a narrow ground level Chicago apartment with eclectic parents who were curious about the world, plus two sisters, an older brother with an engineer’s mind, turned jet engine mechanic and ultimately retiring as 737 pilot.  But, I digress.  

After my latest frustrating round with the philosophy club, I’m sharing an email I sent to an eminent neuroscientist that I swapped some emails with a couple years back.  I’m sharing his response followed by some more explanatory notes.