52 Nick Atlas
consciousness, the innumerable gifts it affords us are what make us
uniquely human.
Unfortunately, tackling this foundational question, often referred to as
the “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers, 2007), has proven
extremely difficult. As contemporary philosopher David Chalmers notes,
“‘Consciousness’ is an ambiguous term, referring to many different
phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are
easier to explain than others” (2007, p. 225). In contrast to the hard
problem, which not only addresses what consciousness is, but also why
consciousness arises at all, there are several “easy” problems.
Among the easy problems are questions such as, “How do we focus
our attention or deliberately control our behavior?” “How do we integrate
information, and discriminate, categorize, and react to our environment?”
“What is the difference between wakefulness and sleep?” And, “How do
we access our own internal states and report on mental events?”
While many of the easy problems may be explained scientifically by
way of quantitative measures and, most often, in terms of biological
mechanisms, neither methodology sheds sufficient light on the hard
problem. The hard problem is the problem of experience. In other words,
“How is it that we may experience a ‘self,’ and an accompanying ‘inner’
life, at all?” It is the problem of subjectivity, or, what it’s like to be
something (Nagel, 1974).
Further complicating the matter is the multitude of ways people tend to
define consciousness. For example, sometimes we refer to a conscious
action as one that is performed deliberately. As you read these pages with
care and attention to detail, you would likely conclude that you are doing
so consciously. We might also say that an organism is conscious when it is
awake rather than asleep. In this example, we may deduce that a single-
celled organism, such as an amoeba, is conscious insofar as it is
performing its life functions in a wakeful state, as opposed to a vegetative
or sleep state. However, would we further conclude that the amoeba is
conscious of its actions (in the same way you are conscious as you read
carefully), or that it is conscious of itself? Probably not, at least not in the
way we think of so-called higher organisms—such as humans, primates,