Hard Problem of Consciousness

In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why organisms have subjective experience, or qualia, at all, in contrast with the so-called easy problems of explaining how physical systems perform functions such as discrimination, information integration and behavior, which are open to ordinary mechanistic or behavioral explanation. Proponents of the hard problem argue that even once every relevant function has been explained, a further question remains: why is the performance of those functions accompanied by experience at all, rather than occurring with no subjective feel? The philosopher David Chalmers coined the terms hard problem and easy problems in a 1994 talk and gave the argument book-length treatment in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind; the existence of the hard problem itself remains disputed, accepted by philosophers such as Joseph Levine and Ned Block and rejected by others such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, with a 2020 PhilPapers survey finding 62.4 percent of surveyed philosophers regarding it as a genuine problem against 29.7 percent who did not.