Although it has been the subject of human thought for many centuries, consciousness remains a mysterious and controversial topic. Every one of us is overly familiar with the phenomenon, but there is little agreement on what it is, what it entails, and how it is created. Certainly, no other phenomenon is simultaneously so familiar and so hard to explain. Researchers from fields as different as medicine, philosophy, psychology, neurobiology, and computer science have tried for centuries to frame, describe, and address the mind-body problem-how consciousness arises from purely physical processes-but success has been, to say the least, limited. Many believe that it is a phenomenon that will remain, forever, unknowable, outside the reach of human understanding. David Chalmers (1) famously argued that, while we may advance in our understanding of the different physical processes that are associated with consciousness (the easy problems), we will never be able to understand the process that leads to subjective experiences (the hard problem), since understanding this phenomenon represents a challenge of an entirely different nature. Other theories, such as mysterianism.
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