What's Consciousness?

[UPDATE:  See post of his presentation here]

[photo from Chalmers' website]
We may or may not find out tonight (Friday April 17) at UAA when Australian philosopher David J. Chalmers talks at the

UAA/APU Consortium Library Room 307.
7 pm.

My daughter, a philosphy major at UW, says "He's big!"

Here's a bit from on

Publish Post

e of his papers:

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
David J. Chalmers
Philosophy Program
Research School of Social Sciences
Australian National University

1 Introduction
Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain.