The wine case Chalmers accepted that cemented the hard problem

Dangerous Ideas - Thinkers Who Paid · Sep 4, 2026 · 22m

The wine case Chalmers accepted that cemented the hard problem

In 1998, a neuroscientist and a philosopher sealed a bet over a case of wine, staking twenty-five years on whether science could locate the exact neural signature of conscious experience. Wine changes hands, arguments pile up in academic journals, thought experiments about zombies and silicon brains circulate for decades — but does any of it answer the question that started it all?

In this episode, we trace David Chalmers's path from a synesthetic childhood in Adelaide to the 1994 Tucson lecture that named "the hard problem of…