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This page summarizes David Chalmers' an axiomatization of a theory of conscious experience in inspired by the early work of David Chalmers (Chalmers, 1996<ref name="mind">Chalmers, David J. The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford university press, 1996.</ref>; Chalmers, 2010<ref name="character">Chalmers, David J. The character of consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2010.</ref>).We remark that the following outline of Chalmers' grounding is intended to highlight the relations among various constituents concepts from Chalmers' work as they could figure in a proper grounding of his groundingand the scientific study of consciousness. It is primarily not intended to be of an introductory natureintroduction to the philosophy laid out by David Chalmers.

as well as more fundamental physical notions such as "mass, charge, and space-time"<ref name="character" />Chalmers, David J. The character of consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2010.</ref> or "atoms, electro­-magnetic fields, and so on"<ref name="mind" />.We thus define the term ''physical domain'' to refer to all those phenomena which are currently considered to be the subject of a natural science (i.e. subjects of physics, chemistry, earth science, biology, etc.).

==== ;A1 ====: "The physical domain is causally closed."<ref name="mind" /> "For every physical event, there is a physical sufficient cause."<ref name="mind" />

==== ;E1 ====: An explanation specifies the function and structure of an explanandumin terms of the the function and structure of accepted theoretical notions.

The crucial aspect of Chalmers' grounding is to establish, in a consistent and explicit way, that there are phenomena, related to consciousness, to which no function or structure (as defined above) can be associated. It follows that these phenomena cannot be explained according to \ref{E1} and hence, if \ref{E1} indeed captures all notions of explanations which are used throughout contemporary science, that they cannot be explained by contemporary science. -- There is an ``[[explanatory gap''~\cite{Levine.1983,Chalmers.1996}. %\footnote{The term ``hard problem of consciousness''~\cite{Chalmers.1995b} has a related but different connotation].}Chalmers refers to these phenomena as ``"phenomenal consciousness", "phenomenal concepts''", ``"phenomenal qualities'' " or ``"qualia''~\cite{Chalmers.1996}.%\footnote{"<ref name="mind" /> In~\cite{Chalmers.2010}<ref name="character" />, he prefers to use the term `experience': ``"Sometimes terms such as `'phenomenal consciousness' and `'qualia' are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of `'conscious experience' or simply `'experience.'\,''~\cite[p".\,5]{Chalmers.2010}.}We refer to these phenomena as `'phenomenal aspects of consciousness':

\begin{enumerate}[label=(D\arabic*)]\item \label{;D1} \textit{: Phenomenal aspects of consciousness} are those aspects of conscious experience which do not have a function or structure, where `'function' and `'structure' are as defined above.\end{enumerate}

The key requirement for this definition of what is to be studied by a science of consciousness to make sense is to establish that there are aspects of experience which satisfy~\ref{D1}, i.e. which neither have a spatio-temporal structure nor a causal role in the production of behaviour. It is the second requirement with respect to which~\ref{A1} is crucial, for \ref{A1} can be utilized to argue that nothing non-physical can have a causal influence on the physical domain.Therefore, all aspects of experience which do not have a spatio-temporal structure (e.g. in the Cartesian sense of being non-extended in space and space-time) automatically satisfy \ref{D1}.

Put in terms == The goal of the scientific study of Definition~\ref{DefG}, consciousness ==It may be conjectured that what is to be studied in the scientific study of consciousness are, according to this grounding, phenomenal aspects of consciousness and their relation to the physical domain. Since these are, by definition, not accessible to the usual scientific methodology, Chalmers proposes that the task of a science of consciousness is to find what he calls ``"psychophysical laws''~\cite[p.\,127]{Chalmers.1996} "<ref name="mind" /> which relate the physical domain to phenomenal aspects of consciousness. Due to Assumption~\ref{A1} and an underlying stance on the nature of causality``"[t]hese laws will not interfere with physical laws; physical laws already form a closed system. Instead, they will be {\em "supervenience laws}'', telling us how experience [= phenomenal aspects of consciousness] arises from physical processes''~\cite[p"<ref name="mind" />.\,127]{Chalmers.1996}.In combination with \ref{E1}, this implicitly points at the major parts of the methodology to be used according to this groundingproposal. == Questions ==

Chalmers' grounding raises several questions related to the definition and ontological status of causality, to the validity of Assumption~\ref{A1}, to the nature of experiments in his grounding , and to the validity of the subsumed notion of explanation, which we discuss in Appendix~\ref{APIssuesChalmers}. The upshot is that there are severe There may be conceptual problems which that make it questionable whether a scientific research program based on this grounding can be carried out at all(cf. e.g. Appendix B in <ref>Kleiner, Johannes. "Mathematical Models of Consciousness." Entropy 22.6 (2020): 609.</ref>).

Furthermore, any scientific approach based on this grounding faces the question of which mathematical structure one is to use in order to describe phenomenal aspects of consciousness when formulating ``"psychophysical laws''~\cite[p.\,127]{Chalmers.1996}". Whereas the physical domain comes with a clear-cut mathematical structure, Chalmers' grounding merely asserts that the phenomenal aspects form a set and offers no systematic way of tying additional mathematical structure to the phenomenology of experience.