{"id":2868,"date":"2013-08-28T09:49:25","date_gmt":"2013-08-28T13:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/?p=2868"},"modified":"2013-08-28T09:49:25","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T13:49:25","slug":"the-hard-problem-of-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/2013\/08\/28\/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Illustration by Michael Marsicano<\/p><\/div>\n

Consciousness. What is it? The Core cannot say.<\/p>\n

However, an article by\u00a0Michael Graziano for Aeon Magazine<\/i> makes some interesting claims. Here is an extract:<\/p>\n

Many thinkers have approached consciousness from a first-person vantage point, the kind of philosophical perspective according to which other people\u2019s minds seem essentially unknowable. And yet… we spend a lot of mental energy attributing consciousness to other things. We can\u2019t help it, and the fact that we can’t help it ought to tell us something about what consciousness is and what it might be used for. If we evolved to recognise it in others \u2013 and to mistakenly attribute it to puppets, characters in stories, and cartoons on a screen \u2014 then, despite appearances, it really can\u2019t be sealed up within the privacy of our own heads.<\/p>\n

Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that \u2018I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,\u2019 and so on. But how does a brain become\u00a0aware<\/i> of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the \u2018easy\u2019 problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the \u2018hard\u2019 problem.<\/p>\n

I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain\u2019s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to a puppet\u00a0and<\/i> the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To read on, visit the full article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consciousness. What is it? The Core cannot say. However, an article by\u00a0Michael Graziano for Aeon Magazine makes some interesting claims. Here is an extract: Many thinkers have approached consciousness from a first-person vantage point, the kind of philosophical perspective according to which other people\u2019s minds seem essentially unknowable. And yet… we spend a lot of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3740,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[48447,3490,2277,48445,3335,48446,437,45006,426,48448],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3740"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2870,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2868\/revisions\/2870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/core\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}