Why the Mystery of Consciousness Is Deeper Than We Thought
Despite great progress, we lack even the beginning of an explanation of how the brain produces our inner world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes. A thought experiment with “pain-pleasure” zombies illustrates that the mystery is deeper than we thought.
In the 1990s the Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously framed the challenge of distinguishing between the “easy” problems and the “hard” problem of consciousness. Easy problems focus on explaining behavior, such as the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to surprises. Still incredibly challenging, they’re “easy” in the sense that they fit into standard scientific explanation: we postulate a mechanism to explain how the system—the brain—does what it does.
The hard problem comes after we’ve explained all of these functions of the brain, where we are still left with a puzzle: Why is the carrying out of these functions accompanied by experience? Why doesn’t all this mechanistic functioning go on “in the dark”? In my own work, I have argued that the hard problem is rooted in the way that the “father of modern science,” Galileo, designed physical science to exclude consciousness.
Chalmers made the quandary vivid by promoting the idea of a “philosophical zombie,” a complicated mechanism set up to behave exactly like a human being and with the same information processing in its brain, but with no consciousness. You stick a knife in such a zombie, and it screams and runs away. But it doesn’t actually feel pain. When a philosophical zombie crosses the street, it carefully checks that there is no traffic, but it doesn’t actually have any visual or auditory experience of the street.
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