Conceivability may outrun possibility
Critics deny that imagining a zombie clearly enough establishes that an exact physical duplicate without consciousness is genuinely possible.
Contemporary philosophy · 1966–
Chalmers
Chalmers separates explaining what a cognitive system does from explaining why any of it is accompanied by felt experience.
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher whose work centres on consciousness, metaphysics, language and technology. He made the hard problem of consciousness a defining contemporary debate and has defended forms of property dualism, modal reasoning and two-dimensional semantics.
MindKnowledge
The question he enters
The question Chalmers enters
Why should physical information-processing feel like anything from the inside?
The central move
Separate function from experience
Chalmers distinguishes relatively tractable explanations of discrimination, report, access and control from the hard problem of why those processes are accompanied by phenomenal consciousness. Conceivability arguments involving philosophical zombies are used to challenge the claim that physical facts alone logically entail experiential facts.
Key ideas
Terms that carry the argument.
- Hard problem
- The problem of explaining why and how physical or functional processes give rise to subjective experience.
- Easy problems
- Problems about cognitive functions such as reporting, integrating information and controlling behaviour, difficult scientifically but functionally specifiable.
- Philosophical zombie
- A conceivable physical and behavioural duplicate of a person that lacks conscious experience.
- Naturalistic dualism
- The view that consciousness is a fundamental feature governed by lawful relations but not reducible to physical properties.
Where the view strains
Objections and limits.
Causal work becomes obscure
If physical causes already explain behaviour, irreducible phenomenal properties risk becoming causally idle.
Sources and routes
Read the work. Follow the argument.
Primary texts
Where to meet the position.
- David ChalmersThe Conscious MindWebA systematic argument against reductive materialism and for a fundamental theory of consciousness.Author-maintained page for the 1996 Oxford University Press book, with contents and selected supporting material. · Official author page with bibliographic information and selected extracts or supporting material; not the complete book. Checked Aug 2026.
- David Chalmers's author websiteConsciousness and Its Place in NatureWebA map of materialist and anti-materialist positions on consciousness, including the route to naturalistic dualism.Author-hosted HTML of the chapter published in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, edited by Stephen Stich and Fritz Warfield, 2003. · Free full text hosted by the author. Checked Aug 2026.
- David ChalmersFacing Up to the Problem of ConsciousnessWeb · PDFThe influential distinction between easy problems and the hard problem.Author-hosted version of the article published in Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), 1995. · Free full-text HTML with a PDF link on the author's official site. Checked Aug 2026.
- David ChalmersConstructing the WorldWebA defence of scrutability and a framework connecting epistemic and modal structure.Author-maintained page for the 2012 Oxford University Press book, with extended contents and selected manuscript material. · Official author page with bibliographic information and selected supporting material; not the complete book. Checked Aug 2026.