Tucson

The desert city where, at a 1994 conference, David Chalmers named the hard problem of consciousness and gave the field its central question.

The first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference gathered neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists and philosophers who mostly did not read each other. Chalmers, then a young postdoc, drew a line between the easy problems, which are about what the brain does, and the hard problem, which is why any of that doing is accompanied by experience at all. The phrase was picked up immediately and has organised the argument ever since, including among the many people who think the distinction is a mistake.