The hard problem is leaking dangerously into the real world though. Chalmers' original paper posited consciousness as a physical quantity, which presumably could be empirically studied.
I don't think so, because to Chalmers it's an epiphenomenon, and so has no influence on the outside world. Only our minds experience consciousness, but as an epiphenomenon it doesn't influence our behaviour one bit, so to Chalmers, we might actually not even have consciousness and are simply deluded in thinking we do.
Exclamations of "but I know I'm conscious!" would mirror exactly those of a p-zombie who wasn't conscious.
Chalmers' consciousness is not an epiphenomenon, it s an entity of its own, but not part of the physical world
> I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.
The problem that most physicalists see is that this introduces an entity seemingly needlessly, which breaks occam's razor.
So me saying "I am conscious"/"I exist" is not influenced by consciousness? In his view, this subjective experience just happens to be bound to and is observing a person - "me" - that says this?
