concept

The hard problem of consciousness

The question posed by philosopher David Chalmers: why is physical information processing *accompanied* by an inner, subjective experience - the felt sense of what it is like to be a given system? One could, in principle, fully explain every function of the brain (how it recognizes, remembers, decides) and still not have touched why any of it *feels* like something. Thomas Nagel sharpened it with "What is it like to be a bat?": you could know every physical fact about a bat's echolocation and still not know what it is like from the inside. It is precisely why showing that a network computes falls far short of showing that it feels.