The Hard Problem of Consciousness

David Chalmers gave the contemporary debate its name in a 1995 paper, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies and expanded a year later into his book The Conscious Mind (1996, Oxford University Press). Chalmers separates the "easy problems" of consciousness — explaining how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, focuses attention, controls behavior, and reports on its own internal states — from the single "hard problem": why any of this physical processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all, rather than occurring, as he puts it, "in the dark," with no felt quality whatsoever. The easy problems, on his view, are difficult but ultimately tractable by the standard methods of cognitive science and neuroscience, since they concern functions and mechanisms; the hard problem is different in kind, because a complete functional explanation of a mental state seems compatible with there being no accompanying experience at all, leaving unexplained why experience, or "qualia," exists over and above the functioning.