touching on consciousness

David Chalmers gave a lively talk today at the Festival of Ideas, on puzzles of consciousness. I was expecting more of a challenge to materialist explanations though. Instead I found that, though Chalmers insisted on the first-person privileged access to consciousness as unique and somehow irreducible to third-person description, he was keen to establish, as part of a ‘science of consciousness’ a formalisation of the experience of conscious states. He tried to present this in a non-reductive way as some kind of generalised formalisation, a kind of field which captures while not capturing the uniqueness of individual conscious experience, but I didn’t myself find that approach too promising, at least as presented. Too hazy and metaphorical at this stage.