ABSTRACT
The nature of consciousness According to Chalmers (2007), ‘consciousness’ is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena, some of which are easier to explain than others. The ‘easy’ problems of consciousness are those that seem directly accessible to the standard methods of cognitive science and include the: 1. ability to discriminate, categorise and react to environmental stimuli 2. integration of information by a cognitive system 3. reportability of mental states 4. ability of a system to access its own internal states 5. focus of attention 6. deliberate control of behaviour 7. difference between wakefulness and sleep. All of these phenomena are associated with the notion of consciousness, and there is no real argument about whether they can be explained scientifically (in terms of computational or neural mechanisms). This is what makes them ‘easy’, implying not that we have a complete explanation for them, only that we know how to go about finding one. For Chalmers, the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness is the problem of experience:
...When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it’s like to be a conscious
organism. The subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception on different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all these states is that there is something it’s like to be them ... (Chalmers, 2007)
experience the darkness, open them and experience the light, focus on depth in the room you are reading this in, and so on. What are those experiences like?
