Hard problem of consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is the question of why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience — why there is something it is like to be a conscious creature at all.
The phrase was coined by philosopher David Chalmers in a 1995 paper and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. Chalmers distinguished the "easy" problems of consciousness — explaining cognition, attention, perception, behavioral integration, all in functional and computational terms — from the hard problem of explaining the felt qualitative character of experience: the redness of red, the taste of coffee, the ache of grief. Even if we knew every detail of the brain's computation, Chalmers argued, the question why those computations are accompanied by experience at all would remain.
The hard problem is one of the most-cited current challenges to metaphysical naturalism. If consciousness is just a feature of physical organization, why does any physical organization feel like anything? Why is the universe not full of complex information processors that operate “in the dark,” with no inner life? Theists and dualists offer this gap as evidence that mind is not reducible to matter and may require a nonphysical explanation — an immaterial soul, a divine mind, or a panpsychist substrate.
Naturalist responses fall into a few camps. Some philosophers (Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, Keith Frankish) hold that the hard problem is a confusion: there is no explanatory gap once you understand what consciousness actually is, and the apparent mystery dissolves under careful analysis. Others (Galen Strawson, David Chalmers himself in some moods) accept the gap and adopt panpsychism, the view that experience is a fundamental feature of all physical things. Still others (Colin McGinn) accept the gap but argue that human cognitive limits prevent us from ever solving it — a position called mysterianism.
For philosophy of religion, the hard problem matters because it is one of the few places naturalism is on its back foot in mainstream philosophy. The argument is not that consciousness proves God exists — that step would require much more — but that it offers the theist genuine evidence against the strongest naturalist worldview. Whether that evidence is sufficient depends on how confident one is that some naturalistic solution will eventually be found.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Consciousness
- David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996)
Related terms
- Metaphysical naturalismMetaphysical naturalism is the view that the natural world — the world studied by physics, chemistry, biology, and the other sciences — is all that exists; there are no gods, souls, or supernatural realms.
- Methodological naturalismMethodological naturalism is the working principle that scientific inquiry should look only for natural causes — not because the supernatural is ruled out as impossible, but because invoking it would prevent the inquiry from going anywhere.