The Philosophical Hard Problem
Some say consciousness is mysterious. But there are two ways to think about this. One is that consciousness is mysterious in the way that the idea of a soul that survives death is, and the other is in the way that the mechanism of evolutionary inheritance was before DNA was discovered.
Today, the mystery of consciousness is often discussed in terms of a special quality—the way it feels to be consciousness. This phenomenal feeling is to be what makes red seem red, and fear feel fearful. Unconscious states come with no such feelings. Philosopher Thomas Nagel refers to these feelings as “qualia," and David Chalmers, another philosopher, has argued that qualia constitute the “hard problem” of consciousness. READ MORE...
