What is Consciousness?
Part I of 'On Consciousness'
Have you ever wondered if the color "red" looks the same between you and I? Or whether "pain" feels the same for others? This is what we call "qualia", or the subjective experience–our personal perception of visuals, tastes, smells, sounds, touch and even emotions. Qualia is believed to be a key component of consciousness. This then begs the question whether we can just measure qualia by tracking all neural activity in your brain? Subsequently, would that explain what consciousness really is?
To explore this, let us do a thought experiment. Imagine Mary, a brilliant physicist who has spent her entire life in a black-and-white room. She knows everything about color vision - wavelengths, neural pathways, brain activity - but she has never actually seen color. One day, she steps outside the room and sees "red" for the first time. The question emerges: did she experience or learn something new? Most would say “yes”. Philosopher Frank Jackson had proposed this scenario in 1982 to argue that factual knowledge (e.g., the physics of color) cannot fully explain experiential knowledge (e.g., what it feels like to see red).
Building upon this, David Chalmers, in the 1990s, introduced a key distinction in the study of consciousness: the “easy” and “hard” problems. The easy problem involves explaining the functions and behaviors associated with consciousness while the hard problem involves explaining the experiential or subjective nature of consciousness.
Why is it so hard? Chalmers suggests that if brain functions could exist without subjective experience, then qualia is not mere automatic byproducts of physical processes (i.e. neural activities in the brain). Even if neuroscience fully explains how human brains processes information and controls actions, it still cannot explain why these processes feel like something to have certain experiences. This explanatory gap is why the problem of consciousness remains one of the greatest unsolved problems for centuries.
The Consciousness Research Network (CoRN) aims to tackle this great challenge, and push the boundaries to discover more about consciousness.
Written by Setthanan (Joe) Jarukasemkit, MD
(Photo Credit: Chattarin Poungtubtim)