How does conscious experience (subjective experience, qualia, etc.) arise from non-conscious material? What is the relationship between physical processes and subjective experiences?
David Chalmers calls this the hard problem of consciousness. (1994)
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject.
- The Hard Problem of Consciousness
- especially when related to how consciousness arises from non-conscious material
However, the hard problem of consciousness is not new.
It is an ancient tension, the mystery of how subjective experience can exist in a world consisting of “objective” physical matter. Long before Chalmers, it was the mind-body problem. And long long before that, it was the reason nearly every culture, and arguably every language, developed words like “soul” or “spirit”. To gesture at something beyond the body, something inward (or outward?) and intangible. The modern version just speaks the language of neuroscience and metaphysics rather than myth and theology, but the question itself hasn’t changed: What am I — and why does my ‘understanding’ of the world seem not to include me?
This dilemma seems to be at the core of human existence. It reveals itself in our languages and stories, resurfacing time and time again.
How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story.
- Thomas Huxley, 1868
Why is the hard problem of consciousness so hard?
Consciousness is an inherently subjective experience, and in that way, it is quite different from all the other things that neuroscience has elucidated, such as intelligence, behavior, etc. There is NO way for objective science to observe your subjective experience.