The Hard Problem: Can Science Ever Explain Consciousness?

From the reading: The Hard Problem: Can Science Ever Explain Consciousness?

Close your eyes for a moment and notice the particular quality of redness when you open them again — not the wavelength, not the neural pathway that fires, but the raw, inward feel of it. This sensation, irreducibly private and impossible to transfer to another mind, is what philosophers call a quale (plural: qualia), and it sits at the centre of one of the most stubborn puzzles in the history of thought. In 1995, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers gave the puzzle its name: the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problems, he argued — understanding perception, attention, memory, even the confabulation that constructs a plausible story from fragmentary neural signals — could eventually yield to neuroscience. The hard problem, by contrast, may never yield at all, because it asks something fundamentally different: not how the brain processes information, but why that processing feels like anything.