{"id":127581,"date":"2021-09-12T11:22:55","date_gmt":"2021-09-12T18:22:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-has-an-easy-part-we-can-solve"},"modified":"2021-09-12T11:22:55","modified_gmt":"2021-09-12T18:22:55","slug":"the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-has-an-easy-part-we-can-solve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-has-an-easy-part-we-can-solve","title":{"rendered":"The Hard Problem of Consciousness Has an Easy Part We Can Solve"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-has-an-easy-part-we-can-solve.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren\u2019t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what\u2019s called the \u201chard problem\u201d of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/nautil.us\/blog\/heres-how-well-know-an-ai-is-conscious\" target=\"_blank\">David Chalmers<\/a>. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, we can break the problem down: If we can tackle what you might call the easy part of the hard problem, then we might make some progress in solving the remaining hard part.<\/p>\n<p>This is what I\u2019ve been up to in recent years with my partner in crime, Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at U.C. Santa Barbara. Since I came up in philosophy, rather than neuroscience or psychology, for me the easy part was deciding the philosophical orientation. Schooler and I duked it out over whether we should adopt a materialist, idealist, panpsychist, or some other position on our way to a complete answer. I am, as I\u2019ve <a href=\"https:\/\/nautil.us\/blog\/-electrons-may-very-well-be-conscious\" target=\"_blank\">written<\/a> in <i>Nautilus<\/i> before, a card-carrying panpsychist, <a href=\"https:\/\/tamhunt.medium.com\/resonance-and-process-philosophy-e5b801045ca6\" target=\"_blank\">inspired<\/a> by Alfred North Whitehead, David Ray Griffin, David Skrbina, William Seager, and Chalmers. Panpsychism suggests that <a href=\"https:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/82\/panpsychism\/consciousness-isnt-self_centered\" target=\"_blank\">all matter has some associated mind\/consciousness<\/a> and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter, where there is matter there is mind. They go together like inside and outside. But for Jonathan, this was far too glib. He felt strongly that this was actually the <i>hard<\/i> part of the problem. Since he\u2019s the <a href=\"https:\/\/psych.ucsb.edu\/people\/faculty\/jonathan-schooler\" target=\"_blank\">Distinguished Professor<\/a> and I\u2019m not, we decided to call this philosophical positioning the hard part of the hard problem.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"\"><p>Consciousness is a snapshot of time.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren\u2019t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what\u2019s called the \u201chard problem\u201d of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher David Chalmers. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}