The Debate

October 14, 2026, Jeff Lorsung

Does my subjective experience influence the scientific questions I ask? Absolutely. My education, thirty years of professional experience, my life as a caregiver, and my experiences with artificial intelligence all shape what I observe, question, and suspect.

Does that invalidate my scientific approach? Unequivocally not. But those experiences can also introduce bias, making independent evidence and critical investigation essential.

I suspect that biology's many different mechanisms instantiate a deeper, common organization. But what if that organization is merely a pattern I have imposed on what I observe? What would it explain or predict that existing mechanistic accounts cannot?

And, most importantly, what evidence must I actively pursue to construct the strongest possible objection to my own hypothesis?

A recent conversation brought me back to the great Chalmers–Dennett debate over consciousness, which unfolded while I was an undergraduate studying psychology in the 1990s.

When I was younger, I perhaps did not fully appreciate the disagreement between these two men. I understood their arguments, but I see the debate differently today.

They were challenging one another over something more fundamental than consciousness: what constitutes a legitimate scientific question, what evidence it requires, and what an explanation must actually explain.

The Disagreement

In 1995, David Chalmers published Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. He distinguished between the "easy problems"—explaining perception, memory, attention, and other cognitive functions—and the "hard problem": why are those physical processes accompanied by subjective experience at all?

Even a complete account of the brain's mechanisms, Chalmers argued, might leave something unexplained. Why does pain hurt? Why does seeing red feel like something? Perhaps experience requires explanatory principles beyond conventional physical science.

Daniel Dennett was having none of it.

In 1996, Dennett published Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness. He compared Chalmers's reasoning to vitalism: the old belief that living organisms required a special life force beyond their physical processes. If scientists explained metabolism, reproduction, growth, and repair, would we really need a separate principle to explain "life itself"?

Dennett thought Chalmers had made a similar mistake with consciousness.

The exchange became remarkably sharp. Dennett called the hard-problem distinction an "illusion-generator" and declared Chalmers "flatly mistaken."

His deepest objection, however, was methodological.

Chalmers had suggested that subjective experience might need to be treated as a fundamental feature of the world, analogous to mass, charge, or space-time in physics.

Dennett challenged the analogy. Physicists did not introduce their fundamental categories simply because they were convinced something remained unexplained. They had independent evidence motivating those concepts and establishing their explanatory usefulness.

Where, Dennett asked, was the equivalent evidence for introducing subjective experience as an additional fundamental property?

If the only justification for a new explanatory principle was the conviction that existing explanations were incomplete, the reasoning risked becoming circular.

Chalmers responded in 1997 with Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness. Dennett, he argued, was assuming away the very thing that needed explanation. Explaining the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms associated with grief did not necessarily explain what grief feels like.

Each challenged the other's starting premise. Neither conceded it.

Rereading their exchange nearly thirty years later, I am struck by its intensity. Two extraordinary intellects, both committed to understanding consciousness, could not agree on what constituted an adequate explanation.

By the standards of modern academic etiquette, their exchange might almost be considered hostile. It reads like two gentlemen from another age preparing to duel, exchanging impeccably formal courtesies while carefully taking aim at one another's intellectual foundations.

Beneath the sharp rhetoric was something worth preserving: neither man was willing to surrender the objection merely to maintain the appearance of agreement.

The Influence of an Education

I studied psychology at St. John's University, a Benedictine liberal arts institution in Minnesota. My professors were steeped in a tradition that examined faith, reason, philosophy, and the natural world together.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, they were more drawn to Chalmers.

His willingness to question whether physical explanation was sufficient resonated with a tradition comfortable asking not only how something works, but what it is. Dennett's objections received comparatively little attention.

But another influence mattered just as much: Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas approached difficult questions through disputation. He presented formidable objections before stating his position and answering them. The objections were not inconveniences to dismiss. They belonged to the reasoning itself.

This was something we were taught to practice, not merely admire. I still reason this way today.

For thirty years, I worked in technology and systems integration, looking beyond components to the structures governing their interactions. Different implementations could yield similar outcomes; different representations could describe the same relationships.

Later, as a caregiver investigating complex immune conditions, I began asking why seemingly similar biological circumstances could produce dramatically different outcomes. Was there an underlying structure governing those trajectories?

That question led me toward the possibility of invariant biological dynamics.

Then, nearly thirty years after college, I encountered Chalmers again. His principle of organizational invariance surfaced from somewhere in my long-term memory: the same causal organization, potentially preserved across different physical implementations. I recognized the idea immediately.

I cannot establish whether Chalmers planted that intuition or whether subsequent experience brought me toward a related question. Perhaps both.

But today I also hear Dennett much more clearly.

A beautiful conjecture does not establish the existence of what it conjectures. An elegant organizing principle does not become a scientific law because it fits an appealing picture.

It must do explanatory work. It must be allowed to fail.

The Value of an Objection

My interactions with researchers have taught me something else about disagreement.

More than once, people have looked at my employer or my lack of a conventional academic research background and found sufficient reason to dismiss my thinking. They are entitled to that judgment.

But the researchers who have most influenced me took a different approach.

They did not simply agree with my ideas. They challenged them. Sometimes they identified errors in my reasoning. Sometimes they shared their own research, offered a subtle hint, or posed a question that forced me to reconsider an assumption.

They didn't demand that I accept their conclusions. They gave me something more valuable: a way to examine my own.

The researchers who moved me didn't hand me an answer. They handed me a thought pattern.

And that brings me back to the Chalmers–Dennett exchange.

Their disagreement was essential. Their rhetorical blows were memorable. But it was the objections, not the blows, that advanced the inquiry.

There is a difference between challenging someone's thinking and challenging their right to think.

Observation Before Mechanism

Modern biomedical research rightly demands mechanistic rigor. Patients need treatments grounded in reproducible evidence, not merely compelling explanations.

But the organization of research is also shaped by incentives.

Government grants, pharmaceutical investment, institutional funding, and academic advancement all influence which questions are pursued. Research proposals often need plausible mechanisms, measurable outcomes, defined deliverables, and a reasonable prospect of success.

Much of that is justified. Public money requires accountability. Companies must finance expensive development programs. Scientific institutions must allocate limited resources.

But incentives also shape intellectual opportunity.

Money does not determine scientific truth. It does, however, influence which scientific questions receive the resources necessary to investigate them.

Questions that cross disciplines, challenge existing categories, or begin with a pattern rather than a known pathway may be harder to fund and pursue. We risk rewarding researchers for answering increasingly narrow questions while making it harder to ask whether those questions belong to a larger structure.

Science has not always proceeded from mechanism to explanation. Often, it has moved in the opposite direction.

For centuries, astronomers recorded the movements of the heavens. Kepler found mathematical regularities in planetary orbits. Newton explained them through laws of motion and gravitation.

Yet a residual remained: Mercury's orbit advanced slightly more than Newtonian calculations could account for. Einstein's general relativity explained that discrepancy while preserving Newton's extraordinary success within its domain.

Observation revealed the pattern. Mathematics described it. Theory explained it. And the residual demanded that we look again.

Einstein's theory did more than account for an anomaly. It reproduced the successes of the existing framework while making new predictions that could be tested.

We cannot simply keep adding variables to rescue a favored explanation. Sometimes our state description is incomplete. Sometimes our governing rule is wrong. The difficult work is telling the difference.

This is where I still hear Chalmers.

What if our current explanations are incomplete?

And immediately, I hear Dennett.

What evidence requires another explanation?

Both questions deserve an answer.

Two Possibilities

That brings me back to Dennett's hardest question: Why is an additional explanatory principle needed at all?

I don't yet have an answer. But I see two possibilities, inspired by Chalmers and Dennett rather than propositions either man made about biology.

The Chalmers-inspired hypothesis: A deeper, transferable organization exists across different biological systems, despite their distinct mechanisms and histories.

If we can identify its governing structure, AI might help reconstruct history-bearing states, predict their recursive evolution, anticipate irreversible injury, and identify interventions before a patient's future narrows. We might discover therapeutic relationships across diseases currently treated as unrelated, accelerating the identification and investigation of promising drug classes.

The possibilities are extraordinary.

The Dennett-inspired hypothesis: No additional common organizing rule is required to explain the observed trajectories. Biological outcomes may emerge from interacting mechanisms and histories, without a transferable invariant of the kind I am seeking.

AI might still greatly improve prediction and treatment, but there may be no simpler governing structure waiting to be discovered.

That would not be a failure of science. It would be an answer.

There is also an important subtlety. A genuine higher-level invariant could emerge entirely from known biological mechanisms. Discovering such a pattern would not necessarily mean discovering a new fundamental law of nature. Dennett himself recognized the explanatory value of higher-level patterns.

What matters is whether the proposed organization does useful scientific work.

Can it generalize across patients, tissues, and interventions better than competing explanations? Can it predict outcomes that existing models cannot, without continually adding variables to protect itself from failure?

Or is the apparent invariant an artifact of the representation?

This is where Dennett's challenge becomes particularly important to my own inquiry.

I have independent observations that motivate the question: divergent immune outcomes, persistent effects of prior exposures, and different responses to seemingly similar interventions.

These phenomena warrant investigation. But their existence does not independently establish the common organization I suspect governs them. They might be explained by known mechanisms, more complete descriptions of biological state, or models that do not require a shared invariant.

My evidence for asking the question is not evidence for the answer.

The divergent biological trajectories are observable. The common organization I suspect governs them remains a conjecture. Its scientific value must be established by what it explains and predicts that competing accounts cannot.

I am not searching for something beyond biological mechanisms. I am asking whether those mechanisms instantiate a more general organization that we have not yet learned to recognize.

I suspect they do. I believe discovering it could transform how we understand and treat disease.

But I cannot allow the importance of that possibility to lower the standard of evidence required to establish it.

The discipline is not to extinguish the belief. It is to keep the evidential bar higher than the motivational force.

Competing explanations must be allowed to win. The conjecture must be allowed to fail. And I cannot continually add variables simply to protect an idea I want to be true.

The Discipline of Both

I hope the incentives shaping modern biomedical research are not cultivating the very habit I worried about in my AI Summa: becoming so proficient at established methods, and so rewarded for applying them, that we lose the independence to question their assumptions.

The concern is not that scientists lack imagination. It is whether our institutions give ambitious questions sufficient room to be investigated—and sufficient discipline to be rejected when the evidence demands it.

Einstein's lesson was not to discard Newton because of one discrepancy. It was to take the residual seriously enough to question the framework, then develop a better explanation that could itself be tested.

Perhaps AI will help medicine pursue broader questions once beyond our practical capacity to investigate. But the opportunity is not to abandon mechanisms. It is to discover broader patterns worth explaining through them.

My own research places objections inside the investigation: competing explanations, limitations, and explicit tests designed to challenge the conjecture.

It is not enough to identify circumstances under which my hypothesis might fail. I must actively seek evidence that could undermine it, test alternatives that might explain the observations better, and resist changing the proposed organization merely to protect it.

The objection is not something I wait to encounter. It is something I have a responsibility to investigate.

And there is an irony in writing this essay.

I began by revisiting a debate from thirty years ago, only to discover that I was documenting something about my own intellectual history. The arguments hadn't changed. But thirty years of experience had changed the way I understood them.

The history didn't change. The person interpreting it did.

Historia statum mutat, non regulam. History changes the state, not the rule.

I don't need to choose between Chalmers and Dennett.

Chalmers reminds me to ask the larger question. Dennett reminds me to challenge its premises. Aquinas taught me that both voices must have a place within my own reasoning.

The objection belongs inside the inquiry, not outside it.