Problem Set 9

The questions below are indexed to the subsections of chapter 6, so that you can better locate the
answers.

6.1: According to Chalmers, what is a psychophysical law, and what role does it play in a theory of
consciousness?

Psychophysical laws are the laws that connect he phenomenal properties of experiences to the
physical laws usually studied by conventional science. Just as physical laws help us to understand
the physical world, psychophysical laws will help us understand consciousness.

6.2: What are the psychophysical laws Chalmers postulates? Explain each of them.

The Reliability Principle – When you judge that you have experienced a sensation, you have
experience that sensation.

The Detectability Principle – When you experience something, you can form second-order
experiences.

6.3: What is the relationship between awareness and consciousness for Chalmers? Talk about some
cases in which this relationship seems challenged, and explain how Chalmers argues that these
cases provide no problem for his theory.

Chalmers defines awareness as “a subject is aware of some information when that

information is directly available to bring to bear in the direction of a wide range of behavioral
processes” , and he also proposes that the more available the information becomes, the
more likely it is to be incorporated into a conscious experience.

He brings up the example of blindsight, where nerve and brain damage can cause a person
to develop a blind spot due to a lack of visual processing for the area in question, but can
answer questions about the blind spot with better than random chance, meaning that they
are aware of something without being conscious of it. Chalmers responds by stating that
while it is true that the subject is not conventionally conscious of the information, since the
sight information does not fit into his definition of awareness, they are not conventionally
aware of it either.

6.4:

a) How does Chalmers use psychophysical laws to help to bring the projects of neuroscience (for
example) and a theory of consciousness together?

If you take the coherence principle as a given, once you have an account of how the human nervous
system that allow for the awareness of color, this should be mirrored in the structure of
experiencing color.
b) With respect to neuroscience’s claims about consciousness, what does it mean to say that
psychophysical laws act as epistemic levers?

In this case, epistemic lever is a way of looking at information that allows you to make educated
guesses about experience based on empirical data.

6.5: At the very end of the chapter, Chalmers says:

It seems reasonable to suppose that this qualifies as awareness, and that by the coherence principle,
there is some kind of accompanying experience. Around here the matter gets tricky. It is tempting to
extend the coherence further down the information processing scale; but sooner or later, the notion of
“awareness” gives out on us and can do no explanatory work, due to its indeterminacy. I will not
speculate on this matter now, but I will return to it later.

By “later” he means chapter 8, where he will argue for a tie between consciousness and
information. Thinking of what he has said about awareness and its relationship to consciousness,
and then what he says here in the above paragraph, can you see where he is making a connection
to “information” in general? This is a hard question, but take a stab at an answer based on the
chapter.

I am not sure, but it feels like he is laying the groundwork for the panpsychicism ideas that I have
heard so much about, where every object and piece of information has some rudimentary
consciousness.