1.2 The ‘hard problem of consciousness’

Why do we even have these subjective conscious experiences? Can they possibly be explained by what happens physically inside our brains? This is often regarded as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. It’s an intriguing question. As you found in the previous section, it’s hard enough defining consciousness, let alone explaining it!

(To be clear, there are ‘easy problems’ too – relatively speaking! These problems involve cognitive functions. For example, identifying the mechanisms in our brain involved in processing visual information and how we react to that information, rather than how and why we have a subjective experience of seeing something.)

It certainly seems very mysterious that these experiences could all come from purely physical processes. How does whatever it is that makes ‘us’ arise from the action of biological cells in the brain? After all, these brain cells are much like any other cells that make up our bodies and the rest of the living world.

While we don’t yet have a universal notion of consciousness, let’s look at how it might be studied – and how we might tackle the so-called hard problem.