The “Hard Problem” of Consciousness with David Chalmers

This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1996. 

David Chalmers, Ph.D., is a former professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Here he points out that most modern attempts to explain consciousness fail to address the fundamental problem of subjective experience — i.e., what it is like to be consciousness. Theories of perception, cognition, information processing, behavior, self-concept, etc. only deal with facets of of consciousness not with the difficult problem of the actual existence of consciousness. Chalmers maintains that a materialist philosophy is not capable of adequately accounting for the very existence of subjective experience — the most fundamental fact of our lives.

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