the hard problem of Consciousness is the problem of how physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and of the world if you look at the brain from the outside you see this Extraordinary Machine um an organ consisting of 84 billion neurons that fire and synchrony with each other when I see visual inputs come to my eyes photons hit my eyes they send a signal that goes up the optic nerve to the back of my brain it sends neural firings propagating throughout my brain and eventually I might produce an action from the outside though I look like a complicated mechanism a robot this is how science might describe me from the objective point of view view but there's also a subjective point of view there's what it feels like for the agent who is seeing the scene when I see you I see colors I see shapes I have an experience from a first person point of view there's something it's like to be me and this is the conscious experience of seeing it's part of the inner moving of the Mind this inner movie has many many dimensions it has the dimension of vision it has the dimension of sound like a normal movie but it also has touch and taste and smell it has emotions it has thought it has a sense of one's body all of this is subjective experience it's one of the most familiar facts in the world that we have this subjective experience but it's also one of the most mysterious why is it that these physical processes in the brain should produce subjective experience why doesn't it go on in the dark without any Consciousness at all no one right now knows the answer to this question so in the science and philosophy of Consciousness people use the word Consciousness for many different things and some of the things are easier to explain than other things so sometimes I like to distinguish between the easy problems of Consciousness and the hard problem the easy problems are not really so easy they're as difficult as most problems in science but it's the hard problem that's really the mystery so sometimes we use Consciousness just for the difference between being awake and being asleep and we say well how is it that a system could be awake and on its feet and responding maybe for this we can have an explanation in terms of the right neural mechanism in the head that produces this Behavior eventually we'll explain this one of the easy problems or how is it that the perceptual system can discriminate some information and respond to it how is it the brain can monitor itself again in principle that's a question about objective processing an explanation in terms of neurons in the brain could explain it so for all of these we have accepted paradigms from science come up with some mechanism in terms of neurons that produce this Behavior then we've solved the problem so those are the easy problems the hard Problem by contrast is the problem of how it is that all these processes give rise to subjective experience and what's distinctive about this is it doesn't seem to be a problem about objective mechanisms about for example behaviors that the brain produces we could tell a complete story about the objective mechanisms in the brains the neurons that fire the behaviors they produce and so on explaining all these functions awakeness responsiveness discrimination monitoring and there might still be a further question why is all that associated with subjective experience it's just a different kind of question think ultimately it's a question for science but it's a question which right now our scientific methods don't have a very good handle on so at least for now it's a central question for philosophy now philosophy has a great history of turning its questions into science many of the Great Sciences start of his areas of philosophy physics was originally part of philosophy until Newton developed his physical theories in the 17th century once he figured out how to solve it then it became a science something similar happens with Linguistics and psychology and economics I would like eventually Consciousness to turn into a problem for science but first of all philosophy needs to do its work with this problem to make it tractable right now we're just in the stage where philosophy and science are cooperating on solving this problem the scientists are now starting to think about Consciousness for the first time in some years but it's still of a level of thinking about correlations correlations between the brain and Consciousness rather than the level of fundamental explanations but we could hope that eventually we might have some theory of the the connections between the brain and Consciousness my own view though is it will not be a purely reductionist of physical explanation we won't explain Consciousness purely in terms of the brain in terms of the brain you'll get a good solution to the easy problems to the various behaviors and so on but you'll never get a full solution to the hard problem why is all this accompanied by experience rather what we need to do is to take conscious experience itself as a as primitive as a fundamental element of the world it's the same attitude we take towards space and time and mass and physics we don't reduce them to something more fundamental but then we come up with fundamental laws that govern them and that can explain them so in physics the physicist say we're looking for fundamental theory in physics so simple maybe you could write it on the front of a t-shirt for Consciousness maybe we want a a story the fundamental laws connecting the brain and Consciousness so simple we can write it on the front of a T-shirt and the fundamental principles that connect brain processes to Consciousness right now we don't know what those fundamental principles might be there are some ideas the neuroscientist Julio Toni thinks it might be some principles involving integrated information uh so that when the brain integrates there's a fundamental law that says when the brain integrates enough information then you get consciousness this does raise many of the traditional aspects of the philosophical Mind Body problem what is the place of Consciousness in the physical world and how does it exert a causal role is consciousness something separate from all the brain processes that exert some effect on the brain as many of the traditional dualists say the view I'm attracted to is that Consciousness is actually present at a fundamental level inside the brain and inside all physical processes this is the traditional philos opical view known as pan psychism that maybe all the physics involve some element of Consciousness at the basic level somehow all of this composes to yield my Consciousness it's a beautiful unified attractive view of the world where Consciousness and the physical world might be integrated all the way down the big problem for this view is again another version of the hard problem but now in the version how can these small bits of Consciousness at the found mental level add up to the kind of single unified conscious experience that I have people call this the combination problem how do the atoms of Consciousness combine to yield human consciousness nobody right now has a solution to that problem but at least people are thinking about it so right now we're in a real period I think of ferment and excitement with many ideas about how to solve this problem nothing like a consensus yet I'd be surprised if we have a consensus solution to the problem in the next 20 or 30 years but if we're lucky maybe within 100 years it's possible we could have some kind of accepted philosophical SL scientific theory of the hard problem of consciousness