The Christian Vanguard

Chalmers suggestion for addressing the hard problem is to posit that consciousness is a fundamental feature or law such as space, time, mass, and change in that it is not reducible or explained in terms of more basic entities. So it will have its own rules and regulations, like the other basic or fundamental features of our world do. He wants to call them psychophysical laws. This wouldn’t be without precedent for Chalmers as he notes that electromagnetic phenomena couldn’t be explained by previously known physical features and laws, and so they had to posit electromagnetic charge as a new basic feature of the world since nothing in the physical world could explain it. Likewise with consciousness, since there seems to be no already existing theories which encompasses it, then something new is required.

The easy problem of consciousness is figuring out how we receive information and how we respond. Some questions that fall under the easy problem are “How does the brain integrate information?” and “How is it that subjects can verbalize their internal state?” This is not to say that figuring out the answers to these questions are easy to do or are trivial, but that they are easy compared to the hard problem. And the hard problem asks how do physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience, or consciousness, at all? How experience works is the easy problem and why we have experience at all is the hard problem. One needs to figure out how to cover that explanatory gap.