ABSTRACT
This chapter presents in detail the main reasons offered for a pessimistic belief in the hard problem, notably the five central arguments offered by David Chalmers. These arguments are rooted in our first-person access to consciousness, and they provide the central line of justification for our problem intuitions about consciousness. The chapter then introduces Derk Pereboom’s “qualitative inaccuracy hypothesis,” which holds that it’s a serious possibility that we might be in error about the nature of our conscious states. Defending the plausibility of this hypothesis is a key step in the optimistic debunking argument. Finally, the chapter presents “type-Q” materialism—a view motivated by Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction—to help better frame the debate in naturalistic terms.
