Consciousness and the hard problem
Explaining what the brain does is one thing. Explaining why any of it feels like something is another.
Easy and hard problems
David Chalmers separated the 'easy' problems of consciousness, such as explaining attention, memory, and the ability to report what we see, from the hard problem: why these processes are accompanied by subjective experience at all. Science can make progress on the easy problems by finding mechanisms, but it is unclear that any mechanism explains why there is something it is like to be you.
Qualia and Mary's room
Qualia are the felt qualities of experience, like the redness of red. Frank Jackson imagined Mary, a scientist who knows every physical fact about colour vision but has lived in a black-and-white room. When she first sees a ripe tomato, does she learn something new? If so, the argument goes, some facts about experience are not physical facts.
Responses
Physicalists reply in several ways. Some say Mary gains a new ability or a new way of knowing an old fact, not a new fact. Others argue the hard problem will dissolve as neuroscience matures. Panpsychists take another route and propose that some form of experience is a basic feature of matter, so it never has to emerge from nothing.
Flashcard
Why physical processes are accompanied by experience
Check your understanding
Which of these is an example of the hard problem of consciousness, rather than an 'easy' problem?