ABSTRACT
HARD QUESTIONS AND EASY QUESTIONS The problems surrounding consciousness may be divided into the ‘hard questions’ and the ‘easy questions’ (Chalmers, 1995). Hard questions have to do with fundamental theoretical problems such as ‘What is consciousness?’, ‘How could purely physical activities give rise to subjective conscious states?’, or, conversely, ‘How could a subjective conscious state have a causal influence on the activities of neurons?’ ‘Easy questions’ are those which appear open to existing methods of empirical research; for example, the contingent relationship of given states of consciousness to given states or functions of the brain. What makes a hard question hard is that, given our current understanding of consciousness and how it relates to the brain, it is not clear what kind of answer would satisfy us.
