Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

If any of you have read the big picture, my most recent book, you know that one of the things we have to think about,

if we're naturalists trying to come to terms with the world of our experience, is the phenomenon of consciousness.

Actually, most of you probably know that, even if you haven't read that book, it's a pretty well-known fact.

The question, of course, is what is demanded of us by the fact of consciousness?

Can we simply hope to explain consciousness using the same tools we explain other things with?

Atoms and particles moving according to laws of physics, according to the standard model and the core theory,

or do we need something else somehow that helps us explain what consciousness is and how it came about?

So I'm someone who thinks we don't need anything else. I think it's just understanding the motion and interactions of physical stuff,

from which consciousness emerges as a higher level phenomenon.

Our guest today is David Chalmers, who is probably the most well-known and respectable representative of the other side,

the people who think that you need something beyond just the laws of physics as we currently know them to account for consciousness.

David is the philosopher who coined at the term the hard problem of consciousness.

The idea being that the easy problems are, you know, how you look at things and why you react in certain ways,

how you do math problems in your head. The hard problem being our personal experience, what it is like to be you or me,

rather than somebody else, the first person's subjective experience.

That's the hard problem and someone like me thinks, oh yeah, we'll get there.

It's just a matter of words and understanding and philosophy.

Someone like David thinks we need a real change in our underlying way of looking at the world.

So he describes himself as a naturalist, someone who believes in, you know,

just the natural world, no supernatural world, not a dualist who thinks it's a disembodied mind or anything like that,

but he's not a physicalist. He thinks that the natural world has not only natural properties, not only physical properties,

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