Consciousness Philosophy

Consciousness — the subjective, qualitative experience of being — is the 'hard problem' of science and philosophy (David Chalmers, 1995): while science can explain the physical correlates of consciousness (neural activity, brain states), it cannot explain why these physical processes produce subjective experience (qualia) at all. Why does the smell of coffee have that particular character? Why is there 'something it is like' to be a bat (Thomas Nagel, 1974)? Major theories: Global Workspace Theory (Bernard Baars — consciousness is a 'broadcast' from a global workspace making information widely available to the brain); Integrated Information Theory (Giulio Tononi — consciousness is identical to integrated information, measured by phi; controversial because it implies plants have some consciousness); Higher-Order Theories (consciousness requires representation of mental states by higher-order states); Predictive Processing (consciousness is the brain's model of itself); and Quantum Consciousness (Penrose-Hameroff — consciousness arises from quantum processes in neural microtubules, widely dismissed as lacking evidence). The 'combination problem' (how individual neural correlates combine into unified experience) and the 'binding problem' (how the brain combines information from separate processing streams into unified perception) remain unsolved.