Hard and Easy Questions about Consciousness

Abstract

Abstract After a quiet period for much of the twentieth century, presumably reflecting the influence of various forms of behaviourism, in recent years philosophical writing on consciousness has reached epidemic proportions. A well-known philosophical website lists almost a thousand online articles on the philosophy of consciousness, and no doubt there are another thousand not so available. This writing has, however, had a quite peculiar focus. A founding document of recent philosophical studies of consciousness is Thomas Nagel ‘s classic article ‘What is it Like to be a Bat? ‘ The almost universally accepted answer to this question nowadays is that although there is definitely something it is like to be a bat, it is extraordinarily difficult, perhaps impossible, to say exactly what this is. More difficult still is the problem of explaining how this ineffable something could somehow have resulted, as it is almost universally agreed it must, from the merely mechanical operations of the brain. This latter conundrum, in particular, has come to be known as the Hard Problem of consciousness— in contrast with the apparently ‘Easy Problem ‘ of understanding the relevant mechanical operations of the brain— and has provided the motivation for a great deal of the philosophical work I have mentioned.