The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Resources

Compiled by David Chalmers

This is a set of resources keyed to my TED talk on the hard problem of consciousness.

Articles

My articles introducing the hard problem are "The Puzzle of Conscious Experience" (Scientific American, slightly more accessible and with pictures) and "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (Journal of Consciousness Studies, with more detailed arguments. For older sources, see these articles from Wikipedia and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

For Dan Dennett's response to the hard problem, see his "Facing Backward on the Problem of Consciousness", and also his earlier book Consciousness Explained. For my response to him, see "Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness".

For panpsychism, see these articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For my take, see "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism" (with an argument for the view) and "The Combination Problem for Panpsychism" (with problems for the view).

For Giulio Tononi's information integration theory, see Christof Koch's introductory article "A complex theory of consciousness". For more details, see Tononi's articles "Consciousness as Integrated Information" and "From the phenomenology to the mechanisms of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0". See also Scott Aaronson's recent critique.

Videos

For a number of videos where I discuss consciousness, see here. For a number where I discuss panpsychism, see here.

Here's Dan Dennett's TED talk on the illusion of consciousness and an opposing line by Ned Block.

Here's another TED talk by me on the distantly related topic of the extended mind.