Scientific advances have sent people to the Moon and to the greatest depths of the ocean. We’ve split the atom and created computers that can defeat a chess grandmaster. And yet science still can’t explain arguably the most fundamental aspect of existence – our subjective experience of existence. Our consciousness.
That’s not for a lack of trying. There are many consciousness theories, it’s just that none is widely accepted. Part of the reason is the two-tiered nature of the challenge. There’s what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers called the ‘easy problem’ of consciousness, which is explaining the biological processes that underlie mental functions, like perception, memory and attention. But there’s also the ‘hard problem’, which is explaining how and why there is a subjective, first-person aspect to these mental functions (why, when you stub your toe, you don’t simply register the damaging contact – it actually hurts). Scientific theories of consciousness particularly struggle with the hard problem – in fact, there’s disagreement about whether there really is a hard problem at all.
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