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The Conscious Mind

David Chalmers·1996·English

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Chalmers's statement of the hard problem of consciousness: explaining why any physical process should give rise to subjective experience at all. He distinguishes easy problems (explaining cognitive functions) from the hard problem (why there is something it is like to be conscious), and argues that the hard problem resists any straightforward physical explanation.

It is widely believed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. This is the hard problem of consciousness, and it is the most baffling problem in the science of the mind.

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