The Consciousness Salon
Dave “the hard problem” Chalmers, the gray-haired guy on the stool, mansplains to Susan MacTavish Best, in the black dress, at a salon she organized. I’m kidding, Chalmers is a nice guy, he never mansplains. The murky photo mirrors my murky consciousness.
New York, April 14, 2024. The high point of the consciousness salon is when Susan MacTavish Best asks David Chalmers whether we’d be better off without consciousness.
But first, backstory: In March I received an email invitation to “an evening salon Does Consciousness Matter? w/ philosopher David Chalmers on April 11th 7pmish at my loft in Soho/NYC. This will be an evening filled with conversation, live music, homemade food and our warm NYC Posthoc community.”
The email is from Susan MacTavish Best, who, Google informs me, founded Posthoc, a firm that hosts salons in New York and other cities. I didn’t know hosting salons is a profession. The guests, I gather from an emailed list of attendees, come from tech, finance, science, philosophy, fashion, the arts, media, you name it.
I live like a monk, haven’t been to a real party in years, so I enter Best’s high-ceilinged, second-floor loft with dread-laced anticipation. The sensory assault is immediate: throbbing music, clamorous conversation, savory food smells, books, books, everywhere, hip-looking men and women milling about, swilling drinks.
In a kitchen toward the rear of the loft, a stately, blond woman, bare shoulders glistening with sweat, toils over a stove, barking orders and greetings. This scarily exuberant Valkyrie is our host, Susan MacTavish Best.
Mingling, I meet a woman from the Templeton Foundation, which tries to nudge science in “spiritual” directions. Templeton funds Chalmers and other consciousness scholars and put up moola for this salon. Speaking to the nice Templeton lady provokes a twinge of guilt. In 2005 I took money from Templeton and then wrote mean things about it.
Everybody is so interesting! A guy named Ali is making capitalism more equitable by giving poor people property, that is, land. Yes! That’s the cure for capitalism, make everyone a capitalist!
A genial, bearded philosopher describes his theory of consciousness. It sounds intriguing, and vaguely familiar, and I realize I once mocked this nice man’s theory in Scientific American. Why am I always such a jerk?
My throat is getting scratchy from yelly chitchat when Best, who has traded her apron for a sleek dress, commands us to be quiet. She and Chalmers, perched on high stools, are going to talk now.
Best asks Chalmers to explain the difference between what he famously calls the “hard problem” of consciousness and easy problems. Yikes. The obvious questions are often the toughest. The room is hushed, I’m nervous for Chalmers.
But Chalmers is a cool cat. With his usual emphatic lucidity, he says easy problems involve cognitive functions such as perception, memory, decision-making, muscle control. Science is making headway tracing these functions to neural processes. [See Postscript.]
But how and why, Chalmers continues, is cognition is accompanied by conscious experiences, like the ones he’s feeling at this salon? The smell and taste of food and drink, the ebb and flow of music, the wobbliness of the stool on which he’s sitting. How does a brain, a lump of mere matter, generate subjective, first-person sensations? That is the hard problem.
Researchers have proposed all sorts of theories of consciousness, like integrated information theory and the global workspace theory. None of these theories has been empirically validated, not even close. Chalmers nonetheless remains confident that one day researchers will solve the hard problem.
After Chalmers wraps up his riff with this obligatory optimism, things take an unexpected turn. Best points out that many conscious experiences are painful. Is consciousness, on balance, maybe not such a good thing? Would we be better off if it had never evolved?
Chalmers seems taken aback by the question, and so am I. I typecast Best, who once ran a public-relations firm in Silicon Valley, as a power-of-positive-thinking person: Life is fantastic, it’s great to be alive, conscious, etc.! But no, dark currents course beneath her glossy surface.
Chalmers vigorously defends consciousness. Yes, he acknowledges, first-person experiences can be painful. But without consciousness, we’d be zombies, who lack an inner life. Consciousness makes our lives meaningful.
Listening to Chalmers stick up for consciousness, Best squints skeptically, which is funny. She asks about his recent book Reality +: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy. Chalmers sums up the book’s argument, which is that virtual reality can be just as meaningful and hence just as real, sort of, as reality.
Best asks the audience who has tried virtual reality devices like Apple Vision Pro or Meta Quest 3. Many hands go up, yeah, of course this is an early-adopter crowd. Best wonders whether it’s healthy for us to spend more and more of our time in virtual worlds lorded over by the likes of Zuckerberg. Yes, another zinger!
Best and Chalmers delve into more topics: Might bugs or fish or artificial intelligences be conscious? (Maybe.) Could Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett be right that consciousness is an “illusion”? (Chalmers disagrees, but he respects Doug and Dan.) Would it be cool if technology fuses us all into one meta-mind, like The Borg? (No, not cool.) Can psychedelics provide insights into consciousness? (Hell yeah!)
When Best asks the audience for questions, I compulsively thrust my hand up. So many questions! After Best calls on someone else, I lower my hand, feeling shy. Here are three questions for Chalmers:
1: Can science invent what your frenemy Christof Koch calls a consciousness-meter, a device that measures consciousness in stockbrokers, bugs, trout, teacups, smart-phones, whatever? Lacking such a device, won’t all theories of consciousness be unverifiable and hence purely speculative?
2: Do you think science can resolve the debate over free will? If science solves consciousness, will it simultaneously solve free will? Or vice versa?
3: Do you ever wake up in the dead of night in a cold sweat because you know the mysterians are right and consciousness is unsolvable?
I’m a mysterian, in the following sense: I don’t think we’ll ever find a single, final solution to the mind-body problem, which encompasses the problems of consciousness, free will, meaning and morality. But does that mean I see no value in consciousness studies? Of course not! I love this wacky field, for two reasons:
First, if researchers can’t find a single, final Solution to the mind-body problem, that means they can keep proposing new solutions, new ways for us to see ourselves and be ourselves, forever. Instead of certainty, we get freedom, which is much better.
Second, Chalmers and other consciousness investigators provide a great service simply by drawing attention to consciousness. I’m not an illusionist, but Hofstadter and Dennett are right that we’re usually not that conscious. We have a terrible tendency to trudge through life like automatons ticking tasks off to-do lists.
At their best, science, philosophy and the arts wake us up, they rub our faces in the weirdness, the infinite improbability, of our existence. So do gatherings like the consciousness salon. Yeah, existence often sucks, it’s scary, it hurts, as Best reminded us during the salon. We need to make the world less painful and unfair. But life is miraculous, too. I’ll end with these lines, which came to me the day after the salon:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Apple Vision Pro.
Postscript: I didn’t take notes at the salon. This column is based on recollections I jotted down while sipping coffee the next morning. How did my brain store memories of the salon for retrieval later? This is what Chalmers calls an easy scientific problem, but it’s pretty fucking hard. By the way, if you attended the salon and think my recollections are inaccurate, please let me know.
Further Reading:
Oh, geez, almost everything I write touches on the mind-body problem. See my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment as well as this list of columns on this website: https://johnhorgan.org/about-cross-check. Especially relevant are “The Solipsism Problem” and “The Dark Matter Inside Our Heads.” See also my 2023 report for Scientific American on a famous bet between Chalmers and Christof Koch and on claims that a prominent theory of consciousness is “pseudoscience.” Oh, and check out my series “Philosophy: What’s the Point?” I mean, what else are you gonna do with your precious consciousness but read my blatherings?