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Phenomenological Representation<br />
The attentive reader will take note that, as explicated so far, Chalmers is yet to deal with<br />
the central problem discussed earlier, of how to represent subjective feels in a manner al-<br />
lowing them to be matched with physical events. To extend Chalmers’ terminology, even if<br />
we solve his hard problem of explaining how consciousness arises, we still have an “even<br />
harder problem” – how to match the contents of consciousness with the information spaces<br />
from which it supposedly arises.<br />
At the very end of the section discussing his prototheory (303–310), Chalmers addresses<br />
the issue (303–4):<br />
We have something over and above a pure information space. Phenomenal properties have an<br />
intrinsic nature, one that is not exhausted by their location in an information space, and it<br />
seems that a purely information view of the world leaves no room for these intrinsic qualities.<br />
He then goes on to make some suggestions about how phenomenology might be tied to<br />
intrinsic properties of matter itself. Perhaps (305)<br />
the information spaces required by physics are themselves grounded in phenomenal or proto-<br />
phenomenal properties. Each instantiation of such an information space is in fact a phenomenal<br />
(or protophenomenal) realisation. Every time a feature such as mass and charge is realised,<br />
there is an intrinsic property behind it… The ontology that this leads to might truly be called a<br />
double-aspect ontology. Physics requires information states but cares only about their rela-<br />
tions… phenomenology requires information states, but cares only about the intrinsic nature…<br />
Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.<br />
Aside from noting just how speculative the book is now becoming, we might be able to<br />
take the proposition seriously. However, this still does not allay the theologians’ misgivings.<br />
Chalmers wants to suggest that mass and charge might be very closely tied to some sort of<br />
intrinsic phenomenal properties but Swinburne would retort: How on earth are you going to<br />
get from simple physical properties to the full range of human conscious experiences? How<br />
are you going to explicate an isomorphism between, say, an aggregate of electron spin and<br />
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