I was surprised, upon listening to a two part interview with Peter Watts, to find him tentatively supporting Chalmer’s positions on qualia and the hard problem. Part of the reason is that Watts is a(n ex-) scientist with a background in biology and neuroscience, and also both very intelligent and spectacularly good at not avoiding unpleasant trains of thought. The other reason I was surprised is that I read Blindsight, and interpreted it as an amazingly good takedown of the Chalmers philosophical zombie idea along the same lines as Dennett’s.
This essay will contain spoilers for Blindsight, probably. Also, spoilers for the epistemology of Chalmers and Dennett. If you don’t like to learn things in orders not officially sanctioned by the establishment, I recommend you at least read Blindsight — it’s a great read, and Watts has been nice enough to put it online for free.
Chalmers presents the idea of consciousness as indicated by qualia — a representation of the subjective feeling of the outside world. His position, in my understanding, is that subjective feeling is a more difficult thing to model than other properties of the world. While I’m not sure about Chalmers himself, other people have used this idea that qualia is a “hard problem” as an excuse for reintroducing cartesian dualism into the world of epistemology — by claiming that qualia is so difficult to model that not even straight-up neurons can model it, and thus we need to bring in quantum nanotubules or some other structure as a stand-in for the soul.
