Talk:Hard problem of consciousness
Contradiction in "Implications for physicalism": swarms of birds used as both positive and negative example of reductive explanation
In the "Implications for physicalism" section, there is an internal contradiction regarding swarms of birds.
The section includes an image of a murmuration captioned "A swarm of birds showing high order structure emerging from simpler physical constituents" — presenting swarms as a paradigm case of physical emergence, fully explicable by constituent parts.
But the body text then says:
- "Chalmers's hard problem presents a counterexample to this view and to other phenomena like swarms of birds, since it suggests that consciousness, and analogously swarms of birds, cannot be reductively explained by appealing to their physical constituents."
This is contradictory on its face — the caption treats swarms as an example of successful reductive emergence, while the body claims they cannot be reductively explained.
More importantly, it misrepresents Chalmers's actual argument. Chalmers's whole point is that consciousness is the exception to an otherwise successful pattern of physical reduction. He explicitly contrasts consciousness with things like clocks and hurricanes — and by extension, swarms of birds — which can be fully described structurally and functionally. The sentence as written inverts his argument.
The phrase "and analogously swarms of birds" appears to be an error introduced at some point in editing. It should be removed, and the surrounding text clarified to reflect that swarms of birds are, on Chalmers's view, not counterexamples to physicalism — they are the kind of phenomenon physicalism handles well. Consciousness is the anomaly.