ESSAYS
Philosophy of mind, read against real physics and real neuroscience — the hard problem of consciousness, the quantum observer, panpsychism, and the question of machine consciousness. No popular-science shortcuts, no mysticism dressed up as physics.
Chalmers split the study of mind into easy problems and one hard one. A close look at why every attempted solution to the hard problem quietly turns out to be a way of changing the question.
Measurement in quantum mechanics really does involve an "observer" — but the physics term and the folk idea of a conscious mind collapsing reality are not the same thing. Where the analogy holds, and exactly where it breaks.
Taken seriously rather than dismissed on sight, panpsychism solves one hard problem and inherits another. What the combination problem actually asks, and why it hasn't sunk the view.
Whether a large language model could ever be conscious depends less on how capable it gets and more on which decades-old argument about the nature of mind you find persuasive.