Contra-Zombies? Contra-Zombies!: Chalmers as a parallel to Hume
Published on October 20, 2025 2:56 PM GMTI think a lot of people misunderstand David Chalmers. Given Chalmers's popular characterization I don't think many people would be aware that David Chalmers allows the possibility that Searle’s Chinese Room is conscious[1]. His public image is that of the foremost advocate of dualism; something associated with wishy-washy quasi-religious theories of consciousness which most people would assume reject something like Searle's Chinese Room out of hand. Of course that is as inaccurate as saying Hume opposed the Enlightenment because he saw non-rational beliefs as necessary for understanding.Chalmers is a minimal dualist, arguably practically a physicalist. Chalmers’s dualism is in many ways simply an end run around all of the logically unanswerable questions that tangle up philosophical discussions of consciousness, one such being the sheer existence of consciousness as discussed in the problem of p-zombies. Chalmers comes to the same conclusion as the people who purport to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TbZnx8HfS2HQKbAiZ/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-the-least-interesting