The Hard Problem of Consciousness

The Hard Problem of Consciousness, named by the philosopher David Chalmers in his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and elaborated in The Conscious Mind (1996), asks a question that no amount of neuroscientific progress has answered: why does physical processing in the brain produce subjective experience at all? Chalmers distinguished this from the "easy problems" — explaining how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, reports mental states — which are mechanistic questions amenable to standard cognitive science. The Hard Problem is different in kind: even a complete map of every neural correlate of consciousness would not explain why there is something it is like to see red, to feel pain, to taste salt. The problem has generated a landscape of competing theories, none commanding consensus. Giulio Tononi's Integrated Information Theory proposes that consciousness is identical to integrated information (phi); Global Workspace Theory, developed by Bernard Baars and elaborated by Stanislas Dehaene, locates consciousness in the broadcasting of information across cortical networks; Daniel Dennett has argued that the Hard Problem is itself an illusion, a residue of confused intuitions about qualia. The Academy hosts the Hard Problem in the Body School because every embodied game — every moment of play in which a body feels the weight of a ball, the rhythm of a stride, the burn of exertion — is an instance of the very phenomenon no one can explain. The wonder is not academic. It is happening now, in you, as you read these words.

David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3), 1995; The Conscious Mind (Oxford University Press, 1996). Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", Philosophical Review 83(4), 1974. Giulio Tononi, "An Information Integration Theory of Consciousness," BMC Neuroscience 5(42), 2004. Bernard Baars, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown, 1991). Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain (Viking, 2014).