Hi Hugh

Thanks for all that.  Sadly, it confirms my worst fears.

First, let me say that I cannot accept that "Chalmers need not provide us with a definition of phenomenal consciousness". How, for example, would we make sense of his "zombie" definition, which is: "A zombie is physically identical to a normal human being, but completely lacks conscious experience."? It is obvious, surely, that unless he has defined "conscious experience" (or "phenomenal consciousness", as you say) the definition is simply null and void.  This is a point I have been making all along.

The notion that we simply "need pointers to [phenomenal consciousness], examples of it," is I think quite insufficient.  Why should philosophers of consciousness be excused the requirement that all other philosophers have to satisfy - to define their terms? Why a lower standard for them?  In any case, how does one "point at" or give "examples" of something unless one knows what that something is? And if one knows, why not say?

Now, as for the points you list from Chalmers, I am I have to say hugely underwhelmed. Here are my comments on each:

(1) To say that "a mental state is conscious if it has a QUALITATIVE FEEL" is surely a statement of the bleeding obvious - but also completely unenlightening. The whole question surely is: what is the "quality" in question?  Chalmers statement is rather like describing an object to someone by saying "It feels like something". That really helps!

(2) He says " Phenomenal consciousness  is ...."the really difficult problem for a science of the mind” it “poses the WORRYING problem of consciousness.”  Once more a statement of the bleeding obvious.  (And here again we meet the idea of "phenomenal" consciousness" which to my mind is a furphy.) The difficult problem - in fact the only problem - is to define what consciousness is.  (And splitting things into "hard" and "easy" problems, as I think Chalmers does, is a red herring. It implies that something has been solved? What?)

(3) He writes :" The phenomenal concept of mind … is the concept of mind as conscious experience, and of a mental state as consciously experienced mental state. ..On the phenomenal concept, mind is characterized by the way it feels…"  This is just the same stuff - going around in the same circle.

(4) is "what it MEANS for a state to be phenomenal is for it to feel a certain way” (p. 11)  See my comment on (1). I cannot undertand how this sort of stuff passes muster among analytic philosophers. It's so patently useless.

(5) is " … in general a phenomenal feature of mind is characterized by what it is like for a subject to have that feature… (p. 12)"  This sounds like Nagel revisited. But in essence we are right back with the "feels" idea. (like = feels like).

If Chalmers definition ("ostensive" definition if you prefer) boils down to the notion of "feeling (like)", we have truly got nowhere at all.  Feeling is simply one of those terms like emotion, awareness, etc that seem already to have the notion of consciousness built in (or at least can we prove that they don't?) so we are defining something in terms of itself. A basic philosophical error.

The last paragraph you quote just raises the same problems in slightly different terms. Can something "appears somehow to someone" unless the someone is conscious? Same circle.

This as I say is very underwhelming.  I'm sorry to ask but is this sort of thing really taken seriously? As you can see, it's riddled with problems.  I feel less and less inclined to read the book

DA