Chalmers isn’t a Cartesian dualist, he’s a property dualist. He feels that consciousness is a manifestation of the material world, just a phenomenon currently unknown to science. Chalmers talks about what he calls philosophical zombies (or “p-zombies” for short). He argues that it’s possible to imagine a being that does everything a human does but is not aware of its own experience. Subjective experiences of things, such as the experience of seeing red, are called qualia. So, Chalmers asks, why are there qualia?
