David J. Chalmers (1995), Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), 200–219. Imprint Academic. The author’s copy is at consc.net/papers/facing.pdf. Much reprinted: in Hameroff, Kaszniak & Scott (eds), Toward a Science of Consciousness (MIT Press, 1996); in Shear (ed.), Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (MIT Press, 1997), with 25 commentaries and the author’s reply; and in Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness (Oxford, 2010).
Key takeaways
- Easy and hard (§2). The easy problems are explaining discrimination, integration, reportability, internal access, attention, deliberate control and the sleep/wake difference. The hard problem is the problem of experience, in Nagel’s “something it is like” sense. The paper proposes keeping “consciousness” for experience and “awareness” for the functional phenomena.
- Why the hard problem is hard (§3). The easy phenomena are functionally definable, so explaining the function explains the phenomenon; “you have explained the verbal report function but not reportability” is a conceptual mistake. “You have explained discrimination, integration and report but not how it is experienced” is not. The gene, life and learning have no such further question.
- Case studies (§4). Crick and Koch’s 40 Hz binding theory and Baars’s global workspace explain binding and accessibility, and are silent on why either is experienced. Five strategies for work of this kind: explain something else, deny the phenomenon, claim to explain experience by “something like magic”, explain the structure of experience, or isolate its substrate.
- No extra ingredient helps (§5). Chaos, nonalgorithmic processing, new neurophysiology and quantum mechanics are all more structure and dynamics, so all leave the same question. Vitalism is disanalogous: its doubt was about functions, and experience is an explanandum, not a posit.
- Nonreductive explanation (§6). Take experience as fundamental, alongside mass, charge and space-time, connected to the physical by psychophysical laws that supplement physics without interfering with it. The paper calls this “naturalistic dualism”.
- Outline of a theory (§7). Two nonbasic principles and one candidate
basic one:
- structural coherence: the structure of experience is isomorphic to the structure of awareness, which is “direct availability for global control”. So global-workspace and similar proposals are best read as theories of the mechanism of awareness, and so of a correlate of experience;
- organizational invariance: “any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences”, defended in one page by the dancing-qualia switch;
- the double-aspect theory of information: information has a physical and a phenomenal aspect. If every information state has the second, experience is widespread, and “perhaps a thermostat … might have maximally simple experience”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for David Chalmers in this record. It is the hard problem’s founding statement and the record’s first Chalmers paper on consciousness itself.
On the hard problem. The record holds several works that take a side on it without the source. Frankish’s illusionist commentary (LIT-103) charges Veit with leaving the hard problem “as hard as ever”. Seth (LIT-135, read in NOTE-169) proposes to dissolve it by the real-problem method, with the vitalism analogy that §5 of this paper argues is disanalogous. Minsky’s Emotion Machine draft (LIT-432) calls it a compression of many problems into one word. Nagel (LIT-096) supplies the notion of consciousness the paper starts from.
On the society-of-mind bridge (THEORY-043). The paper bears on the bridge in two places. My pairings, not the paper’s claims:
- Structural coherence turns List’s concession into a question. List (LIT-401, read in NOTE-340) takes his awareness/experience distinction “following Chalmers 1995” and grants groups awareness in the access sense. This paper’s coherence principle says that “whenever information is available for report and for global control, there is a corresponding conscious experience”. Stated for “familiar cases”, it would, if it held without restriction, turn List’s grant of group awareness into group experience. List blocks that step with an IIT-style bridge principle. The paper therefore marks the spot where the THEORY’s second refusal, the architectural criterion, has to work. A global workspace criterion is, on this paper’s reading, a criterion for awareness, so it cannot by itself separate a modular mind from a nation on experience.
- Organizational invariance appears here only as a sketch. Whether it licenses Schwitzgebel’s upward move (LIT-159) is taken up in the full paper, LIT-392, and its answer is no.
- The double-aspect principle is the “3a” bridge principle that List rejects as too unrestricted (NOTE-340). Read with no further constraint, it is the opposite of an anti-nesting principle: wherever there is information there is experience, at every scale. The paper does not discuss nesting, groups or combination.
On AI consciousness (THEORY-023). The paper does not discuss machines. Its organizational-invariance principle is the conditional that the functionalist side of THEORY-023 assumes. Its hard problem is the reason THEORY-023 finds behavioural evidence insufficient: explaining every function leaves experience open.
On the extended mind (LIT-097). The paper predates it and does not bear on it directly. The extended-mind paper’s own exclusion of experience from its thesis (NOTE-180) fits this paper’s split between functionally defined awareness, which could in principle extend, and experience, which is not functionally defined. That pairing is mine.
Chalmers’s later papers on extended consciousness and on the combination problem, which bear on the last two paragraphs, are being filed in this record by other readers at the same time.
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and it does not belong in the anthology.
Replies held in this record. Dennett’s “Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness” (LIT-397) is the first deflationary reply to this paper, and Chalmers’s own “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness” (LIT-425) later asks for an explanation of the conviction Dennett says is all that remains. Chalmers’s reply to Dennett, “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness” (JCS 4(1), 1997), is not filed.