A counterpoint to Cc’s, “Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now — A story and a challenge for the philosophically minded.”
Introduction: I’m not looking to convince anyone so much as to connect with science-respecting people who are tired of gratuitous philosophical mysterianism and trust in physical reality and Evolution as guides to understanding ourselves, along with our deepest questions.
(March 9, 2026) - Citizenschallenge wrote: Thank you Professor for your invitation and I’ll gladly take you up on your offer.
Eight years ago when the Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide snapped into focus for me, like an old time 35mm slide, the experience and clarifying perspective inspired me to write: “The Missing Key to Stephen Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” - so titled because a rereading of his essay triggered the coalescence of decades worth of musings
As for consciousness, that interest goes way back to my youth, I even tried wading through Nagel's essay in the mid-70s until the vertigo got to be too much for me and I tossed in the towel.
In any event, my "Human Mind ~ Physical Reality divide" insight (clarification) started me on a path of knocking on the doors of genuine philosophers via email, occasionally letters, also engaging with the local College Philosophy Department and their Philosophy Club, showing up, listening, sharing handouts, inviting dialogue. The experience has been akin to the sound of one hand clapping. But that wasn’t going to stop me from learning about this philosophical conundrum.
It took eight years of living, questioning, reading, thinking, writing to reach the level of resolution that enabled me to write “Chalmers’ Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now” that I finished this past April. A collection of fact-based scientific evidence and arguments doing its best to tell a significant story challenging the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm with its Hard Problem of Consciousness and its assumed explanatory gap between body & brain, and sense of self & mind.
The D-N-C mindset can’t conceive of body-brain creating a sense of self and thought. For me, Evolutionary biology makes this intellectual-construct of a body-mind gap unnecessary — since, the moral of our cumulative scientific understanding is that creature experience and awareness of self were never separate to begin with.
