Phenomena like these are in some way associated with the notion of conscious-
ness, but they are not deeply mysterious. In principle (even though it may not
really be ‘easy’) we know how to set about answering them scientifically. The
really hard problem, by contrast, is experience: what it is like to be an organism,
or to be in a given mental state, to experience the quality of deep blue or the
sensation of middle C. ‘If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness’,
says Chalmers,
it is this one. [. . .] [E]ven when we have explained the performance of
all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience –
perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report –
there may still remain a further unanswered
question: Why is the performance of these
functions accompanied by experience? [. . .] Why
doesn’t all this information-processing go on ‘in
the dark’, free of any inner feel? In other words,
‘Why should physical processing give rise to a
rich inner life at all?’
(1995a, pp. 201–203)Stated at its most succinct: ‘The hard problem [. . .] is
the question of how physical processes in the brain
give rise to subjective experience’ (Chalmers, 1995b,
p. 63). Or, as British philosopher Colin McGinn puts
it: ‘How can technicolour phenomenology arise from
soggy grey matter?’ (1991, p. 1). This is the latest
incarnation of the mysterious gap.
CONSCIOUSNESS IN CONTEXT
One of the reasons why the mysteries of conscious-
ness are so hard and also so enticing to grapple with
is that they are so closely linked to what it means to
be me: asking ‘am I conscious now?’ or ‘what is it like
to be me now?’ leads naturally on to the questions
‘what am I?’, ‘who is asking the question?’, and ‘what
am I doing?’ (Blackmore, 2011), and once we tackle
these, we find ourselves confronting the concepts of
self and free will. We will address the problem of free
will head-on in Chapter 9, once we have explored
how the mechanisms of attention and embodied
action contribute to our sense of agency in the
world. The self will pop up in all sorts of contexts as
we go along, but we will delay a thorough investiga-
tion of it until the final section, where we will bring
together evidence from the many different fields to
which it relates, and ask what its uses and its pitfalls
are as a concept.
‘How can technicolour
phenomenology
arise from soggy grey
matter?’(McGinn, 1991, p. 1)tHe HARD PRoBLem
the hard problem is to explain how physical
processes in the brain give rise to subjective
experience. the term was coined in 1994 by
David Chalmers, who distinguished it from
the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness. these
include the ability to discriminate, catego-
rise, and react to stimuli, or to report mental
states, focus attention, or control behaviour;
the integration of information by cognitive
systems; and the difference between wake-
fulness and sleep. By contrast, the hard
problem concerns experience itself – that is,
subjectivity or ‘what it is like to be.. .’.
the hard problem can be seen as a modern
version, or aspect, of the traditional mind–
body problem. It is the problem of how to
cross the ‘fathomless abyss’ or ‘chasm’, or
how to bridge the ‘explanatory gap’ between
the objective material brain and the subjective world of
experience.
some argue that new physical principles are needed to
solve the hard problem. mysterians believe it can never be
solved; illusionists think that, like ‘consciousness itself’, it
is illusory; and many neuroscientists believe that once we
solve the easy problems, the hard problem will disappear.C
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