Continuation on recent posts on consciousness.
David Chalmers in The Character of Consciousness identifies Easy Problems of Consciousness EPC (see PS below) as those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The Hard Problems of Consciousness HPC are those that seem to resist those methods, more precisely:
- The really 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 is like to be a conscious organism.
- This 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 in 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 of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
- What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions. To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
- ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli
- integration of information by a cognitive system
- reportability of mental states
- ability of a system to access its own internal states
- focus of attention
- deliberate control of behavior
- difference between wakefulness and sleep
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