In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness is to explain how and why organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems"
David Chalmers on stage for an Alan Turing Year event at De La Salle University, Manila, 27 March 2012
The hard problem is often illustrated by appealing to the logical possibility of inverted visible spectra. If there is no logical contradiction in supposing that one's colour vision could be inverted, it follows that mechanistic explanations of visual processing do not determine facts about what it is like to see colours.
Consciousness
Videos
Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment. It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among phi
Hard problem of consciousness
…In philosophy of mind, the hard problem of consciousness (or simply the hard problem) is to explain how and why organisms have qualia, phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. It is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining why and how physical systems give rise to the ability to discriminate…
Mirror test subjected on a common octopus
Schema of the neural processes underlying consciousness, from Christof Koch
A Buddhist monk meditating
Thomas Nagel argues that while a human might be able to imagine what it is like to be a bat by taking "the bat's point of view", it would still be impossible "to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat". (Townsend's big-eared bat pictured.)