Steven Novella has dismissed it as "the hard non-problem".[24] According to a 2020 PhilPapers survey, a
majority (62.42%) of the philosophers surveyed said they believed that the hard problem is a genuine
problem, while 29.72% said that it does not exist.[25]
There are a number of other potential philosophical problems that are related to the Hard Problem. Ned
Block believes that there exists a "Harder Problem of Consciousness", due to the possibility of different
physical and functional neurological systems potentially having phenomenal overlap.[12] Another
potential philosophical problem which is closely related to Benj Hellie's vertiginous question, dubbed
"The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness", refers to why a given individual has their own particular
personal identity, as opposed to existing as someone else.[26]
Cognitive scientist David Chalmers first formulated the hard problem in his paper "Facing up to the
problem of consciousness" (1995)[1] and expanded upon it in The Conscious Mind (1996). His works
provoked comment. Some, such as philosopher David Lewis and Steven Pinker, have praised Chalmers
for his argumentative rigour and "impeccable clarity".[27] Pinker later said, in 2018, "In the end I still
think that the hard problem is a meaningful conceptual problem, but agree with Dennett that it is not a
meaningful scientific problem. No one will ever get a grant to study whether you are a zombie or whether
the same Captain Kirk walks on the deck of the Enterprise and the surface of Zakdorn. And I agree with
several other philosophers that it may be futile to hope for a solution at all, precisely because it is a
conceptual problem, or, more accurately, a problem with our concepts."[28] Daniel Dennett and Patricia
Churchland, among others, believe that the hard problem is best seen as a collection of easy problems that
will be solved through further analysis of the brain and behaviour.[29][30]
Consciousness is an ambiguous term. It can be used to mean self consciousness, awareness, the state of
being awake, and so on. Chalmers uses Thomas Nagel's definition of consciousness: "the feeling of what
it is like to be something." Consciousness, in this sense, is synonymous with experience.[31][27]
. . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions
in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal
report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these
functions accompanied by experience?
— David Chalmers, Facing up to the problem of consciousness
The problems of consciousness, Chalmers argues, are of two kinds: the easy problems and the hard
problem.
The easy problems are amenable to reductive inquiry. They are a logical consequence of lower-level facts
about the world, similar to how a clock's ability to tell time is a logical consequence of its clockwork and
structure, or a hurricane being a logical consequence of the structures and functions of certain weather
Overview
Chalmers' formulation
Easy problems