DE Weekly: Chalmers, Descartes, & The Hard Problem
Below is an archived email originally sent on April 14, 2025.
Chalmers, Descartes, & The Hard Problem
There are easy problems and there are hard problems. In life, the hard problems seem to permeate generations and stump even the most prolific philosophers. Existentialism deals, in large part, with mostly “hard” problems.
There is perhaps no such harder “problem” as consciousness. It’s so hard, in fact, that it’s sometimes referred to as “the hard problem of consciousness”, or even just “the hard problem”.
Australian philosopher David Chalmers, for one, has written of consciousness as "the hard problem”.
A cognitive scientist, as well, Chalmers is preoccupied with the why and the how of consciousness.
Specifically, how do physical processes in the brain cause subjective experiences to take place in our minds, and why is there “something it is like” for conscious beings? Instead of, you know… nothing?
Contrast these questions with the “easy” problems––cognitive functions such as language processing, memory, and attention––and the difference is the fact that there is no materialistic scientific explanation for consciousness that has sufficiently satiated our philosophical appetite.
That’s why philosophers explore this.
Like most philosophical problems, this one is not new in the slightest; it’s been explored for millennia. For the sake of viewing it like the existentialists, however, I like to begin with René Descartes.
Descartes––with whom you are likely familiar for his dictum “I think, therefore I am”––was trying to figure out consciousness back in the early seventeenth century.
The argument behind Descartes’s famous dictum is that, as humans, we are always “conscious of” something. We are conscious of our body, of the person in front of us, of the environment around us… and we are conscious of our own consciousness.
We know we have a conscience, and so our basest experience is the awareness of our own consciousness. All thought stems from here, and so all thought is inherently conscious thought.
For Descartes, this is the strongest evidence for the existence of our mind as well as our existence itself.
It’s hard to emphasize just how influential Descartes’s thinking has been on the centuries of philosophy to follow, not least for the existentialists.
Many of them tried to argue, build upon, or refute his conclusions, but all owe him a debt, in my opinion, as a cornerstone of their own philosophies.
Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, argued consciousness as being-for-itself. For him, consciousness is always conscious of itself, hence always conscious of something. The very act of thinking about your own existence proves the existence of a mind. This “intentionality” as he called it is what gives it meaning.
Albert Camus, too, believed everything began with consciousness. He agreed with the existing notions of consciousness, and concluded that “nothing is worth anything except through it.”
Before Sartre and Camus, Martin Heidegger concluded that “anxiety” is at the source of everything. Anxiety, of course, representing the subjective experience stemming from our awareness of our own awareness.
As you can see, many of the most prominent philosophers over the last three hundred years have arrived largely at the same conclusion on the hard problem.
That doesn’t mean, however, that new ways of thinking about it and of viewing it haven’t been presented.
Descartes was a proponent of a “dualist” view of the mind and body; he thought that consciousness was a property of the mind, non-physical and totally distinct from the body, never the twain shall meet.
Chalmers, on the other hand, has proposed that panpsychism could be a conceivable argument against this Cartesian dualism.
Pansychism, which I last wrote about back in September, proposes the qualities of the human mind (read: consciousness) are not unique to our brains but exist across the universe, and can be found everywhere.
In other words, consciousness is either everywhere, or it is nowhere.
I don’t know what I think of the panpsychist proposal. I do know that I find it interesting, though. It allows us to explore ideas like the Boltzmann Brain and other such what-ifs. And if science has taught us anything, it’s that we have to be willing to walk these kinds of paths sometimes to arrive at universal truths.
Given that philosophers much smarter than myself have wrestled with this hard problem for centuries and not found a definitive answer, what am I––are we––to make of it?
Perhaps nothing. Perhaps we continue right on living, content with the fact the answer eludes us, does not belong to us, and is a mystery outside our understanding. Such a mode of living is rebellious.
“I rebel, therefore I exist.” –– Albert Camus
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
For a seriously “hard problem” go look deeper into the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis. A book I’ve recommended before, Until the End of Time by Brian Greene, gives a deeply scientific physics-based explanation of the likelihood of one forming, and it’s one of the most fascinating concepts I’ve been introduced to.
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