What is consciousness?: The Story

The bet

In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch wagered philosopher David Chalmers that within twenty-five years, science would discover the neural mechanism producing subjective experience. In June 2023, at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference, Koch paid up — a case of fine wine. The brain scans had gotten exquisite. The correlations had gotten tighter. Nobody had explained why any of it feels like anything.

Consciousness is the one thing every reader of this sentence possesses and no reader can define. You are having an experience right now — the texture of wondering what consciousness is while reading about consciousness. Neuroscience can show you which brain regions light up. It cannot tell you why firing neurons produce an interior life rather than operating in the dark, the way a thermostat regulates temperature without feeling anything about it.

The hard problem

Chalmers coined the phrase. The easy problems — how the brain integrates information, directs attention — are hard by any normal standard but solvable in principle with better data. The hard problem is different in kind: why is there subjective experience at all?

The answers divide along the deepest assumptions a person can hold. Materialists say consciousness is what brains do — the hard problem will dissolve once we understand neural computation, the way vitalism dissolved with biochemistry. Panpsychists say consciousness is baked into reality itself, that every electron has a vanishingly simple interior, and complex experience is what happens when billions organize. The idea sounds bizarre until you notice the alternative — consciousness appearing from nowhere at some threshold of complexity — is equally bizarre.

The contemplatives — spanning Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Dzogchen, and apophatic Christianity — hold that consciousness is not a problem to solve but the ground everything stands on. You cannot explain it in terms of something more fundamental because nothing is more fundamental. The mysterians have read all positions and concluded something unsettling: the human mind may lack the cognitive equipment to solve this, the way a dog lacks equipment for calculus.

The Templeton Foundation funded a $20 million adversarial collaboration pitting the two leading theories against each other. Results published in 2023: inconclusive. Both survived. Neither explained the hard problem. Three thousand years in, the threshold of the greatest mystery remains the one you cross every morning when you open your eyes.

Perspectives:
- Materialists
- Panpsychists
- Contemplatives
- Mysterians