Still Conscious

I now have David Chalmers' book "The Conscious Mind". He has a very different take on conscious experience. He thinks there is a "hard problem" - that is, the problem of explaining the actual inner experience of consciousness - "what it is like to be" something. This is very mysterious to him, and he feels that it means that conscious experience must be a fundamental property or force of the universe.

This means you cannot argue with him that conscious experience might just seem "ineffable", but in fact be a result of neurological actions in the brain. He accepts that the neurological actions are there, associated with the conscious experience, even giving rise to it, but not explaining it. His view is quite different from Daniel Dennett's, (his book: Consciousness Explained) who believes Chalmers has it backwards - the "easy problems" are actually the hard ones (because they will give an account of consciousness) and that the "hard problem" isn't one, because it doesn't really exist! For the time being, I'll stick with Dennett, I think. We'll see what Chalmers comes up with.