Mind and body · Quiz question 19/35

The Hard Problem

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

If neuroscience keeps advancing for centuries, will it explain what seeing red feels like? Chalmers's "hard problem" and Levine's "explanatory gap."

As it appears in the quiz

Imagine neuroscience keeps advancing for hundreds of years.

Eventually, even "what it feels like to see red" will be fully explained.

Who came up with it

David Chalmers distinguished the "easy problems" from the "hard problem" in a 1994 talk at the Tucson consciousness conference and his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness." Explaining functions like attention, reporting and information integration is (still hard, but) an easy problem; explaining why any of that processing comes with subjective experience is the hard problem. Earlier, in 1983, Joseph Levine pointed to an "explanatory gap" between physical explanations and qualia.

Original papers & key readings

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200–219.
Levine, J. (1983). "Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64(4): 354–361.
Churchland, P. S. (1996). "The Hornswoggle Problem." Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(5–6): 402–408.

What it's really asking

If you agreed, you're an optimistic physicalist who expects consciousness to become a normal target of science — just as the "mystery of life" dissolved into biochemistry. Patricia Churchland criticized the easy/hard split for dressing up what we don't know yet as something unknowable in principle.

Chalmers replies that with life, everything to be explained was a function (metabolism, reproduction), but with consciousness, after all the functions are explained, "why is there feeling?" is still left. "Mysterians" like Colin McGinn think there's an answer that human minds just can't reach. More recently, Keith Frankish and others defend "illusionism": the sense that we have phenomenal consciousness is itself a representation the brain creates, so what needs explaining is our belief in experience, not experience itself.

Where philosophers stand

Optimistic physicalism (agrees)

Neuroscience will explain consciousness too. The "hard problem" is a limit of current knowledge.

Key names: Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett

Hard-problem realism (disagrees)

Explaining every function still doesn't explain why experience exists. We need new fundamental principles.

Key names: David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson (panpsychism)

Mysterianism

There's an answer, but human cognition can't grasp it.

Key names: Colin McGinn

In the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, about 52% of philosophers chose physicalism about the mind.

Philosophers to check out