Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 38 of 171
The hard problem of consciousness
Many researchers in AI and neuroscience choose not to grapple with what philosopher David Chalmers calls the “hard problem” of consciousness. The hard problem refers to subjective or phenomenal experience. Chalmers argues that solving perception or cognition is easy because we know how to study these problems, and can explain them with physical mechanisms that perform these functions. But, he says, even when we have explained all the functions of perception15 with physical mechanisms, we are still left with the question of why any of those functions is associated with a subjective experience. When we see a cup of coffee, “there is something it is like” to see a cup of coffee.16 We feel something, and we experience it. How and why? Nobody knows.