The Hard Problem

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS AND WHY DOES IT EXIST?

There is something it is like to see red. There is something it is like to feel grief. There is something it is like to be you, right now, reading these words. This 'something it is like' — the subjective, first-person character of experience — is the hard problem of consciousness, named by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. It is the question that neuroscience, for all its brilliance, has not answered: why does the brain's electrochemical activity produce inner experience at all? Why isn't all the neural processing conducted 'in the dark,' without any accompanying feel? Why are there minds, not just information-processing systems? Across 14 lessons you will encounter the hard problem and the philosophical landscape surrounding it — materialism, idealism, panpsychism, and the growing case for consciousness as fundamental rather than derivative. You will examine the binding problem, the neuroscience of altered states, Ken Wilber's spectrum of consciousness, the global workspace theory, integrated information theory, Karl Friston's free energy principle, consciousness in animals and plants, artificial consciousness, the psychedelic research frontier, near-death experiences as consciousness data, and the radical inversion that may be the only adequate answer to the hard problem: the primacy of consciousness. This is the course that changes what you think you are.

What You'll Learn