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hard problem of consciousness

A brain with a ring around it and a lightbulb, symbolizing the "Hard Problem of Consciousness," which explores why physical processes in the brain are accompanied by subjective experience.

The question, posed in its modern form by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1995, of why physical processes in the brain are accompanied by subjective experience at all. Easy problems — explaining attention, memory, behaviour — are tractable in principle by neuroscience. The hard problem asks why any of it should feel like anything from the inside. No consensus answer has emerged.

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