CONCEPT
Naturalistic Dualism
David Chalmers’s carefully hedged position that consciousness is a real, natural feature of the world that supervenes on physical processes without being reducible to them—the philosophical
foundation from which the hard problem follows and from which machine consciousness becomes a genuine rather than a dismissed possibility.
Naturalistic dualism is
David Chalmers’s name for his own philosophical position: the view that consciousness is a real, natural feature of the world, governed by its own laws that we have not yet discovered, which supervenes on physical systems without being reducible to them. The position is dualist in that it holds consciousness to be something over and above the physical facts—not derivable from them, not exhausted by any functional account of what the brain does. It is naturalistic in that it refuses supernaturalism: consciousness is not a soul, not a divine spark, not something beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is part of nature and in principle explicable by a completed science, though that science does not yet exist. From this position, the
hard problem follows necessarily: because consciousness is not reducible to function and structure, no functional-structural explanation can fully explain it, and the explanatory