Chalmerism is the overwhelmingly dominant belief that what we perceive is “subjective experience,” and that this so-called “subjective experience” is not material reality, but an illusion created by the mammalian brain. Chalmers then labels this “subjective experience” as “consciousness,” then puts forward the “hard problem of consciousness” which is basically that, if what we perceive has nothing to do with material reality, then material reality is always outside of what we perceive, and so there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between this material reality and perception.
Any material explanation would consist of things which lack perceptible characteristics (which, remember, Chalmers called these “consciousness”), and so there would be causal disconnect between that and what we perceive. Any description consisting of a collection of invisible stuff would never explain what we actually observe/experience/etc.
I find that most people these days seem to be Chalmerites, without even knowing who Chalmers even is (or Nagel, who Chalmers cites as inspiration for a lot of his ideas). Chalmerism is so popular that people end up adopting it without even knowing its origin. I even find most materialists I talk to are Chalmerites; they think the “hard-problem of consciousness” is a real, serious problem for materialism, and a few people here even on Lemmygrad called me a “vulgar materialist” for saying I did not believe in Chalmerism.
However, in my opinion, Chalmerism is not actually compatible with materialism because its premises directly contradict materialism.
The word “materialism” typically implies that we are only materialists, and thus we are also substance monists. If we only believe in one substance, then what we perceive has to be material reality. To say it is anything else is to already abandon materialism, because you would be claiming something else exists other than material reality, where what is “experienced” somehow occupies a second substantive category.
That is to say, all monists of any shape have to ultimately be direct realists, or else their worldview is incoherent.
Usually, the response I get is that direct realism cannot work because of “illusions.” However, I’d highly recommend people read Jocelyn Benoist’s book Toward a Contextual Realism, because he addresses all of these concerns quite well.
You see, if we are materialists, then a true illusion in the sense of something which only occupies the mind without any underlying material origin, cannot exist. Let me give you an analogy.
Let’s say you place a pencil half submerged in a cup of water. We might say that there is an illusion because it “looks bent.” However, if we investigate further, we find it is not really bent when we take it out of the water… but why does it look like that when it is in the water? Well, again, with further investigation, we find that it is due to the refraction of light in water.
That is to say, we can amend our incorrect statement that the pencil “looks bent” to “the pencil looks exactly like what a non-bent pencil half-submerged in a glass of whatever looks like.” That is just what a non-bent pencil in that context looks like, and we have a material explanation as to why it looks like that.
It was therefore never a true “illusion” at all. If you are a monist, then all so-called “illusions” must actually just be emergent properties. An emergent property is still materially real, but its cause requires an understanding of some underlying complexities that give rise to that property, in this case, an understanding of how light refracts in water. Everything you perceive must either be fundamental or emergent, none can be a true “illusion.”
I think people also find Chalmerism convincing because what I see obviously isn’t the same as what you see, and, of course, “true reality” should be independent of the observer, so it sounds intuitive to say that what we perceive cannot literally be reality.
However, to borrow language from Benoist again, this argument, in a rather subtle way, conflates subjectivity with contextuality.
Consider one observer watching a moving train fly by while they sit on next to the tracks, and another riding aboard the train. They both perceive the velocity of the train differently. Is that “subjective”? No, because if they both carried radar guns to record that velocity, they would materially record different values, and clearly a radar gun is not a conscious subject.
That is to say, the velocity of the train is materially realized differently between the two observers, but not because they are conscious observers, but because they are measuring it from two different contexts. That is to say, material reality obviously does realize itself in materially different ways under different contexts, and so it is no mystery that two different observers, experiencing reality under two different contexts, would not perceive exactly the same thing.
That is to say, material reality is context-dependent, but not observer-dependent. The observer does not perceive different things from another observer because they are an observer, but because they perceive them from different contexts, and reality is contextual. Indeed, if the radar gun was just left there without any observer there to record the results, but set on an automated mode to record it by itself, it would still record different values. It is therefore perfectly consistent to both say that what two observers perceive is directly equivalent to reality, but that reality is also observer-independent, because the contextual nature of reality is ultimately more fundamental than the observer.
(Reality is not purely contextual. If everything we perceived was contextual, then there would be nothing that connects my perspective to yours in a coherent framework. There are some properties which are non-contextual. The person aboard the train who measured the velocity to be zero with their radar gun would not be surprised to find that the person outside the train measured it to have a non-zero value, because they could predict that with a Galilean transformation. This transformation is only possible because some quantities in Galilean relativity are non-contextual, like relative velocities.)
Another common Chalmerite talking point is that your brain plays a role in what you perceive and so what you perceive cannot be material reality, but that argument only works if you believe the brain has the magical powers to create something immaterial. What role your brain plays in what you perceive, the brain is still a material object, and those roles are still material processes, and so your perception is still an emergent phenomenon of underlying material processes, and thus is still material.
The idea that material reality is something invisible is also a silly notion. It confuses the map for the territory. Mathematics is just a language, and as a language, it is used to describe things, particularly, it is a language constructed for the purpose of describing material reality.
The description is never the same thing as what it is describing. They are always categorically different. There is no “gulf” that separates the two, which implies some distance between them, and that having a better description of something narrows that “gulf.” That’s nonsense. A description is just categorically a different kind of thing to what it is describing. No sufficiently detailed scientific description of fire will ever cause the paper it is written upon to suddenly burst into flames and become a real fire. That is nonsense.
Mathematical models are never material reality. They are descriptions of material reality. Material reality is the thing you are already immersed in everyday, that surrounds you, where your real family members and loved ones reside, where you perform real labor, where you conduct real experiments in the real world. It is not in the mathematical abstractions, or any other kind of abstractions.
Anyways, rant over. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
Good post. Bookmarked. Will finish reading later.
Seems like a reasonable thesis. As someone not too familiar with the philosophy part of cognitive science (or rather, not too familiar with non-materialist parts), how does Chalmerism incorporate dialectics/entropy as part of the model of consciousness? If consciousness is not a derivative of matter but something distinct, what makes it non-static?
The so-called “hard problem of consciousness” really is not a genuine “problem” in the sense of something in search of a solution. The philosophers who put it forward do so as an argument to justify dualism. They don’t want the “problem” to be solved because then it would disprove their dualism. Chalmers himself is openly a self-described dualist and denies materialism. So, Chalmerites typically don’t propose actual solutions.
In my view, it is not a genuine “problem” to be solved to begin with, because it arises from premises which are inherently dualistic. You have to begin with the assumption that what we perceive is not material reality to derive it, and that’s already a dualistic starting point, and you’ll never recover monism in that framework without contradicting yourself. It’s less of a “problem” but more of a proof-by-contradiction that such a starting point makes no sense in a monist framework.
Of course, if what we perceive has no connection to the underlying material reality, then that opens the question of how the two can come to agree. Most dualists historically have been religious and so they just say “God did it.” But Chalmers succeeded in popularizing dualism among secular crowds by trying to give a secular argument in favor of dualism, and thus his proposed “solution” is also secular in construction, and it’s basically just panpsychism.
Panpsychism is a kind of dualism where the mind-body duality is not a property specific to human beings with “souls” but is a property that could even be said to exist of an individual particle, that even an individual particle has a “consciousness,” and that humans have “consciousness” because they are composed of a lot of tiny things which possess one. Panpsychism, in my opinion, has never made any logical sense because of the combination problem.
In my view, since I take what we perceive to be material reality, then the gulf between what Chalmers calls “physical reality and subjective experience” does not actually exist, and it is really just the categorical difference between a description of reality and reality itself, which is not a “gulf” that can be bridged because they are categorically distinct things. No description of reality will reproduce reality in the same sense that no sufficiently detailed description of fire will suddenly cause the paper it is written upon to burst into flames and become a real, tangible, perceptible fire, with real brightness and warmth.
Panpsychism does not make sense because they, in my language, are basically presupposing that each individual particle carries with it a tiny piece of “reality,” but they could never actually formalize that because to formalize it is describe it, and to describe it is to already move outside of reality to a categorically distinct description of reality. Since the description can never carry reality with it, such a model would be logically impossible to formalize.
To move away from my language and into Chalmerite language, by presupposing that each particle carries with it a tiny piece of “consciousness,” well, if they were to try and formalize that into a mathematical model, now they are just writing down numbers governed by laws, and so if a bunch of particles come together to form a human brain, they now have a theory with a lot of numbers in one place, but that does not give them their “consciousness.” There would still be a “disconnect” between a theory that says there’s a bunch of numbers in this location, and what we actually experience.
Any attempt to formalize panpsychism into an actual scientific model will end up reproducing the exact same “hard problem of consciousness,” and so it can only exist as a vague, abstract, ill-defined idea, because it is not coherent. The issue is, again, in my view, because the very basis of the “hard problem of consciousness” is fallacious to begin with, and so it is not something that can even meaningfully be “solved.” It can only be dissolved by changing your premises.
If the word “consciousness” were to mean anything at all, clearly it should be associated with things like self-awareness, intelligence, cognition, etc. But Chalmers strips all of those out in his definition and just claims “consciousness” is what is directly observed prior to anyone becoming aware of it or applying any sort of cognition to it. He, thus, bizarrely, operates on a definition of “consciousness” that incorporates nothing of what the average person would associate with consciousness, and is directly equivalent to what the average person would just call reality.
(Indeed, this is where the idealist comes in: because they have redefined consciousness to just be “reality,” they use their redefinition as proof that reality is fundamentally “consciousness.” The issue, however, is that the idealist stripped out everything we’d normally associate with “consciousness” to make that argument, so, even if we take that argument seriously, they then cannot start to assign reality mental properties like awareness, intelligence, cognition, etc, because they stripped all of those out in their definition to make the argument, so it wouldn’t follow from the argument. However, once idealists have convinced you that reality is “consciousness” with their word games, they will then start to quietly bring those properties back, to start talking about reality as if it is a big cognitive mind, using the implications of that word to bring in further claims from the back door that did not stem from their original argument.)
Ah so it is a kind of atomic reductionist argument – interesting!
The so-called “hard problem of consciousness” really is not a genuine “problem” in the sense of something in search of a solution. The philosophers who put it forward do so as an argument to justify dualism. They don’t want the “problem” to be solved because then it would disprove their dualism. Chalmers himself is openly a self-described dualist and denies materialism. So, Chalmerites typically don’t propose actual solutions.
Maybe you can argue it isn’t a real problem for those specific people, but it is still unclear outside of that what exactly it is that’s giving birth to what people call consciousness and what it looks like as a process beyond self-reporting.
I mean, if you tell me that an image of an elephant popped into your head just now, I have to take your word for it. There is no way for me to observe/measure your internal visualizations to verify what you said. Whether we call it subjective experience or something else, the fact remains that it’s a part of us that is hard to measure and communicate about. Language tries to do this, but can only approximate.
Mathematical models are never material reality. They are descriptions of material reality. Material reality is the thing you are already immersed in everyday, that surrounds you, where your real family members and loved ones reside, where you perform real labor, where you conduct real experiments in the real world. It is not in the mathematical abstractions, or any other kind of abstractions.
So, according to you, material reality is experience? Models or abstractions are not “material reality” but they are genuine reflections of said reality. There is no other reality than material reality and there is no reality without matter. You may as well say “material matter” or even “matter matter” instead of material reality. Yes, everything is matter and there is nothing else, but that doesn’t explain much and soon falls into tautology.
Reality is observer dependent for us simply because you cannot not be a human. Just like Lenin said that subjective is a useless term and “there are no other senses except human, i.e., “subjective” senses, for we are speaking from the standpoint of man and not of a hobgoblin.”
Another common Chalmerite talking point is that your brain plays a role in what you perceive and so what you perceive cannot be material reality, but that argument only works if you believe the brain has the magical powers to create something immaterial. What role your brain plays in what you perceive, the brain is still a material object, and those roles are still material processes, and so your perception is still an emergent phenomenon of underlying material processes, and thus is still material.
So all statements have the same validity? While the cognition process in someone who is denying human-made climate change is real, their statements are wrong and not conforming to reality. A random person on fox news saying that man-made climate change isn’t real doesn’t have the same validity to reality (or truth) than someone educated on this subject.
So, according to you, material reality is experience?
It sounds weird to say that because of the influence of Chalmers, which has associated the word “experience” in everyone’s mind with “consciousness.” But, I am using the terms “experience,” “observation,” “perception,” all interchangeably, so I am saying that material reality is what you observe. If you think what we observe is not part of material reality, then you are a dualist, by definition, because there needs to be two substances, material reality + what you observe.
The material sciences are driven by observation. If you think what we observe is “consciousness,” then all science has done is document consciousness, and there is no basis to say it has documented reality. And then there arises a question of how the two can relate to one another at all if they are entirely different substances, and we could never answer the question because by definition, if you think reality isn’t what we observe, then you cannot observe reality at all, under any conceivable circumstances, and so you could never learn anything about it.
Models or abstractions are not “material reality” but they are genuine reflections of said reality.
I am not sure what is specifically meant by “reflections” here. They are descriptions of reality. If that is what is meant, I agree.
There is no other reality than material reality and there is no reality without matter. You may as well say “material matter” or even “matter matter” instead of material reality. Yes, everything is matter and there is nothing else, but that doesn’t explain much and soon falls into tautology.
I think what you’re saying is that if reality is all material then “material reality” is redundant because it is saying the same thing twice. I would clarify that the reason I use the term “material reality” is because, there is a difference in how I treat them.
Reality is a priori. I take what we observe just to be reality.
If what we observe is reality, what is the best way to understand what we observe, to document it, to describe it, to predict it, etc? And that turns out to be the material sciences, as an a posteriori conclusion. So, “material reality” is really short hand for “reality, as described by the material sciences.”
I start from a neutral stance and come to materialism because it is best justified by the empirical evidence. I don’t see how one can justify idealism from an a posteriori method. Every idealist argument requires you to accept it a priori, which is why they insist upon circular arguments like “I think therefore I am,” which has “I” in both the premise and the conclusion. I don’t buy these kinds of circular arguments.
If idealists could present a methodology that competes with the material sciences, an “idealist science,” which is more effective at building models of reality, I would switch over to idealism. But they are entirely incapable of doing that.
So all statements have the same validity? While the cognition process in someone who is denying human-made climate change is real, their statements are wrong and not conforming to reality. A random person on fox news saying that man-made climate change isn’t real doesn’t have the same validity to reality (or truth) than someone educated on this subject.
I’m not sure the relevance of this. We are talking about what is observed. Not what people think. You seem to take me saying that what we observe is real, to be me saying that everything a person claims is real is real… I really have honestly no idea how you got there or possibly interpreted that from what I said that all.
What people think and say are part of cognition, which is precisely what we are not talking about and that was made clear multiple times throughout the original post. We are not talking about thought, interpretation, cognition, awareness, etc. All of these have no relevance to the discussion. We are just talking about what is observed, regardless of what anyone says or thinks about it, and regardless of whether or not anyone is even aware of it at all.
If a person makes claim X, we verify that in the material sciences by looking. We go and do an experiment to test it. If claim X is correct, we will see that in the results. If it’s wrong, we will see something else.
Indeed, if you disagree with my claim that we can perceive reality, then it is you who lose any grounding for determining the validity of claims, because no experiment could ever reach reality, as we would all always be trapped in some separate “realm of consciousness” and no experiment could ever probe anything beyond it.
It sounds weird to say that because of the influence of Chalmers, which has associated the word “experience” in everyone’s mind with “consciousness.” But, I am using the terms “experience,” “observation,” “perception,” all interchangeably, so I am saying that material reality is what you observe.
In other words, senses. You set sensations in opposition to consciousness. Also, it might be worth mentioning that I don’t know who Chalmers is.
If you think what we observe is not part of material reality, then you are a dualist, by definition, because there needs to be two substances, material reality + what you observe.
No, I am a monist. The world is one matter in motion and there’s nothing beyond matter.
The material sciences are driven by observation. If you think what we observe is “consciousness,” then all science has done is document consciousness, and there is no basis to say it has documented reality.
I don’t think there’s much difference between experiences or senses and “consciousness.” Couldn’t we just as well say we only document experiences/senses?
And then there arises a question of how the two can relate to one another at all if they are entirely different substances, and we could never answer the question because by definition, if you think reality isn’t what we observe, then you cannot observe reality at all, under any conceivable circumstances, and so you could never learn anything about it.
What we observe is reality as far as it conforms to reality. What is contained within the observation can be false. Can untruths be part of reality? I would answer yes. And it would be stupid to say that we can’t learn anything, since that would mean we couldn’t do and repeat specific actions. For example, we learn how to make video games, and we can repeat this process.
I am not sure what is specifically meant by “reflections” here. They are descriptions of reality. If that is what is meant, I agree.
I now think we are arguing for two different reasons. For me, it’s a question of epistemology. While you are just trying to reaffirm the monism of materialism and the world. By reflection I meant perception that contains bits of truths and untruths. Similar, if not the same, with descriptions.
Now when you say: ‘If you think what we observe is not part of material reality, then you are a dualist, by definition, because there needs to be two substances, material reality + what you observe.”
What are we observing according to you? Senses? So do we observe observations and/or sense our senses? Now, senses become primary rather than a more definite form of matter. The argument that we can only rely on our senses is positivism.
The material sciences are driven by observation [or, in other words, senses]. If you think what we observe is “consciousness,” then all science has done is document consciousness, and there is no basis to say it has documented reality.
One could just as easily say against you: If you think what we observe is “senses,” then all science has done is document senses, and there is no basis to say it has documented reality.
I start from a neutral stance and come to materialism because it is best justified by the empirical evidence [positivism].
But that’s the thing, we cannot be neutral, ever. Neutrality is absolute. This 100% unbiased state is impossible. “I start from a neutral stance.” Or you start from zero, which is something that cannot be done.
If a person makes claim X, we verify that in the material sciences by looking.
Looking, as in, with our eyes, is part of human senses. How we interpret these sensations is what is important here.
Indeed, if you disagree with my claim that we can perceive reality, then it is you who lose any grounding for determining the validity of claims, because no experiment could ever reach reality, as we would all always be trapped in some separate “realm of consciousness” and no experiment could ever probe anything beyond it.
Of course we can perceive reality; it would be nonsense to say otherwise. Our disagreement seems to be twofold: I believe there is no such thing as neutrality and that the process of acquiring information, that is, cognition, or observing if you prefer, cannot be neutral.
Your post and comments is a kind of a trojan horse to push anti-Hegel notions in Marxism, with the purpose of effectively eroding the integrity of dialectical materialism. That is clear with your “realm of consciousness” accusation.
I quote Roderic Day here: Conscientialism is a pejorative and ridiculing way to interpret Hegel, whereby a supernatural “World Consciousness” finds expression, like a spooky puppeteer, in historical events. Marx Against Hegel? Idealism, Materialism, and History as Liberation (Losurdo, 2010)
I don’t think there’s much difference between experiences or senses and “consciousness.” Couldn’t we just as well say we only document experiences/senses?
“Consciousness” does seem like a huge outlier here, because typically we associate “consciousness” with things dealing with the mind: cognition, awareness, etc. I really don’t get how people can equate consciousness to just “what is observed.” Again, that strips everything out of it that has anything to do with the mind at all.
What we observe is reality as far as it conforms to reality. What is contained within the observation can be false.
Literally impossible. We can interpret things in a way that is false, but reality cannot, itself, be false.
You can look at a stick half submerged in a glass of water and say, “that stick looks bent,” and then later take out of the water and see it wasn’t bent. Did that mean you have a “false perception” of a bent stick? No, you saw an unbent stick half-submerged in a glass of water, and that is what such a thing looks like. You only falsely interpreted it as bent because you would not have understood how refraction of light in different mediums can change the angles of the trajectories of the light reflected off of an object.
It is always interpretations that are false. Never reality.
untruths be part of reality? I would answer yes.
Untruths, in the sense of something not real, cannot be part of reality… by definition. That makes no sense. Untruths, in the sense of a person making a false interpretation, can be part of reality. The person interpreting reality incorrectly is part of reality, but their interpretation is, indeed, incorrect, and is not reality.
And it would be stupid to say that we can’t learn anything
Who is saying that?
I now think we are arguing for two different reasons. For me, it’s a question of epistemology. While you are just trying to reaffirm the monism of materialism and the world. By reflection I meant perception that contains bits of truths and untruths. Similar, if not the same, with descriptions.
I reject your statement that we can perceive something that isn’t real, because that is dualism.
What we perceive is always real. If we perceive something that looks like something not real, that looks like an “untruth,” like the stick analogy, then there is always some sort of physical explanation to explain why we perceive it that way. Once you give the physical explanation, it is no longer an “untruth,” but an emergent property. Again, the “stick that looks bent” transforms into “a non-bent stick with some of the light refracted due to it being submerged in water.” What we saw, the whole time, was reality. We can sometimes just misinterpret things if we only see it on the surface-level.
To say that we cannot observe anything not real is merely to say that everything we observe has a physical explanation. To deny this is, indeed, to descend into dualism, because what we would observe would have to be fundamentally disconnected from any material explanation.
What are we observing according to you?
Reality.
The argument that we can only rely on our senses is positivism.
No, I am a realist, and most postivists tend to be anti-realists. Positivists make more radical claim that things only exist in the instantaneous moment of perception. Positivists in the early 1900s convinced physicists to throw out the idea of objective reality entirely because you cannot perceive what you are not perceiving in the instantaneous moment of perception, therefore, if you are not looking at something, it is an “unnecessary metaphysical abstraction” to say it even exists.
I find that to be a bit too extreme. If something is real, it has observable properties, so some experiment should be able to reveal its existence. However, that does not mean, for something to be real, it has to be observed in the instantaneous moment. If I look at something, and stop looking at it, I can still say it exists because there is the potential for me to look at it again.
Nothing about saying we can observe reality implies positivism.
It’s also ironic that you accuse me of being a positivist because I believe we can see reality, whereas another camp of people often accuse me of being obsessed with “abstract metaphysics” because I wrote a whole book about how quantum mechanics does not yield a coherent theory of reality because it takes measurements to be fundamental, with a measurement postulate, and cannot describe reality independently of measurement, and thus what we are even measuring at all, and I then defend a so-called “hidden variable” approach on those grounds.
The two possibilities are not dualism or positivism. Those are two extremes. The, in my opinion, correct position, is a more reasonable middle-ground: we can perceive reality, but that does not imply what we are not perceiving cannot be considered real. You could even propose things that are fundamentally not observable but influence the things we observe, if you want. But, that does not negate the fact that the things we do perceive are still real.
One could just as easily say against you: If you think what we observe is “senses,”
I don’t think that. I am getting the impression you aren’t actually reading what I’m writing.
Looking, as in, with our eyes, is part of human senses. How we interpret these sensations is what is important here.
That’s… literally my position! You’re the one who denies this, and says that what we perceive can be literally false, regardless of interpretation!
Of course we can perceive reality;
What??? Then you are agreeing with me the whole time! Why are you posting walls of text attacking me for apparently being an evil “anti-Hegelian” if you agree with my singular thesis that we can perceive reality? Literally everything I have written is defending that one singular thesis, and here you say it is correct.
Our disagreement seems to be twofold: I believe there is no such thing as neutrality and that the process of acquiring information, that is, cognition, or observing if you prefer, cannot be neutral.
Interpretation cannot be neutral, but reality cannot be non-neutral or neutral. It is meaningless to apply concepts like “truth” or “falsity” to reality itself. Reality just is what it is. Talking about truth and falsity requires a level of interpretation of what is perceived.
If, for example, your method of collecting information leads to very biased measurements that lead you to draw the wrong conclusion, the measurements themselves were not “false.” That is precisely what the measurements, under those conditions, really reveal. The falsity lies in the interpretation: of you failing to recognize the bias in the dataset.
You keep trying to shift a failure of interpretation, which is a failure in human cognition, onto reality itself, as if reality is to blame when you make a mistake.
Your post and comments is a kind of a trojan horse to push anti-Hegel notions in Marxism, with the purpose of effectively eroding the integrity of dialectical materialism. That is clear with your “realm of consciousness” accusation.
Hegelianism is idealism. Marxism is anti-Hegelian. Are you literally trying to turn Marxism into Hegelian idealism? wtf?
Not sure why you posted this video. If it’s meant to provide evidence for dualism, as if our thoughts can “create reality,” well, I am a materialist monist, so I include our thoughts as part of reality. so I do not find it strange that thinking patterns (a physical process) can have an influence on your body (a physical thing).
OK. I also think it’s why faith healing/occult craft sometimes work. Funnily enough, someone sometime around the turn of the era noted something about faith the size of a mustard seed…
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
