ne spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher

named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he

meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out or, to use the kind
of language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul.
Though he didnt realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was
about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing
attention to a central mystery of human life perhaps the central mystery of
human life and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.
The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona for what would later go
down as a landmark conference on the subject knew they were doing
something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird
and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience
were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day,
before Chalmerss, hadnt proved thrilling. Quite honestly, they were totally
unintelligible and boring I had no idea what anyone was talking about,
recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. As
the organiser, Im looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting
restless. He grew worried. But then the third talk, right before the coffee
break that was Dave. With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body
denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like hed got lost en route to a
Metallica concert. He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, hes prancing
around like Mick Jagger, Hameroff said. But then he speaks. And thats
when everyone wakes up.
The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to
keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things?
How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your
name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all easy
problems, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts
would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of
consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the
months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters the
Hard Problem of Consciousness and its this: why on earth should all those
complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why arent we
just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises
and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how
does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige
tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience
of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?
What jolted Chalmerss audience from their torpor was how he had framed

the question. At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening
night, eavesdropping, Hameroff said. And everyone was like: Oh! The Hard
Problem! The Hard Problem! Thats why were here! Philosophers had
pondered the so-called mind-body problem for centuries. But Chalmerss
particular manner of reviving it reached outside philosophy and galvanised
everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that were
dealing with here?
Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you cant
follow the news for a week without encountering at least one more tale about
scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness,
or love at first sight, or regret and thats only the research that makes the
headlines. Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence which focuses on
recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to
be one has advanced stupendously. But like an obnoxious relative who
invites himself to stay for a week and then wont leave, the Hard Problem
remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning,
as any student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called C-fibres shot a
message to my spinal cord, sending neurotransmitters to the part of my brain
called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system.
Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain?
And what is pain, anyway?
Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and
philosophy, make some experts openly angry. They have caused others to
argue that conscious sensations, such as pain, dont really exist, no matter
what I felt as I hopped in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that
plants and trees must also be conscious. The Hard Problem has prompted
arguments in serious journals about what is going on in the mind of a zombie,
or to quote the title of a famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas
Nagel the question What is it like to be a bat? Some argue that the
problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what
science could ever explain. On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of
neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to be solved
but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that
computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too.
Next week, the conundrum will move further into public awareness with the
opening of Tom Stoppards new play, The Hard Problem, at the National
Theatre the first play Stoppard has written for the National since 2006, and
the last that the theatres head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct before leaving his
post in March. The 77-year-old playwright has revealed little about the plays
contents, except that it concerns the question of what consciousness is and

why it exists, considered from the perspective of a young researcher played

by Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also clarified a potential
misinterpretation of the title. Its not about erectile dysfunction, he said.
Stoppards work has long focused on grand, existential themes, so the subject
is fitting: when conversation turns to the Hard Problem, even the most
stubborn rationalists lapse quickly into musings on the meaning of
life. Christof Koch, the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain
Science, and a key player in the Obama administrations multibillion-dollar
initiative to map the human brain, is about as credible as neuroscientists get.
But, he told me in December: I think the earliest desire that drove me to
study consciousness was that I wanted, secretly, to show myself that it
couldnt be explained scientifically. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I
wanted to find a place where I could say: OK, here, God has intervened. God
created souls, and put them into people. Koch assured me that he had long
ago abandoned such improbable notions. Then, not much later, and in all
seriousness, he said that on the basis of his recent research he thought it
wasnt impossible that his iPhone might have feelings.
By the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been
vigorously attempting to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time.
The source of the animosity dates back to the 1600s, when Ren Descartes
identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. On
the one hand, Descartes realised, nothing is more obvious and undeniable
than the fact that youre conscious. In theory, everything else you think you
know about the world could be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you
at this point, present-day writers invariably invoke The Matrix but your
consciousness itself cant be illusory. On the other hand, this most certain and
familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesnt
seem to be physical. It cant be observed, except from within, by the conscious
person. It cant even really be described. The mind, Descartes concluded,
must be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didnt abide by the laws
of nature; it had been bequeathed to us by God.
This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism,
remained the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days
of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an
increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism the
position that only physical things exist as its most basic principle. And yet,
even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing
alternative explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became
taboo. Few people doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked:

if you question this, try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife,
and see what happens to your consciousness. But how they were linked or if
they were somehow exactly the same thing seemed a mystery best left to
philosophers in their armchairs. As late as 1989, writing in the International
Dictionary of Psychology, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland could
irascibly declare of consciousness that it is impossible to specify what it is,
what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.
It was only in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double helix,
used his position of eminence to break ranks. Neuroscience was far enough
along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof
Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. It is remarkable, they
began, that most of the work in both cognitive science and the neurosciences
makes no reference to consciousness partly, they suspected, because most
workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of approaching the
problem. They presented their own sketch of a theory, arguing that certain
neurons, firing at certain frequencies, might somehow be the cause of our
inner awareness though it was not clear how.

People thought I was crazy to be getting involved, Koch recalled. A senior

colleague took me out to lunch and said, yes, he had the utmost respect for
Francis, but Francis was a Nobel laureate and a half-god and he could do
whatever he wanted, whereas I didnt have tenure yet, so I should be
incredibly careful. Stick to more mainstream science! These fringey things
why not leave them until retirement, when youre coming close to death, and
you can worry about the soul and stuff like that?
It was around this time that David Chalmers started talking about zombies.

***

As a child, Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the
day he was first fitted with glasses to rectify the problem. Suddenly I had
proper binocular vision, he said. And the world just popped out. It was
three-dimensional to me in a way it hadnt been. He thought about that
moment frequently as he grew older. Of course, you could tell a simple
mechanical story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his
eyeball, his retina, and his brain. But how does that explain the way the
world just pops out like that? To a physicalist, the glasses-eyeball-retina
story is the only story. But to a thinker of Chalmerss persuasion, it was clear
that it wasnt enough: it told you what the machinery of the eye was doing, but
it didnt begin to explain that sudden, breathtaking experience of depth and

clarity. Chalmerss zombie thought experiment is his attempt to show why

the mechanical account is not enough why the mystery of conscious
awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.
Look, Im not a zombie, and I pray that youre not a zombie, Chalmers said,
one Sunday before Christmas, but the point is that evolution could have
produced zombies instead of conscious creatures and it didnt! We were
drinking espressos in his faculty apartment at New York University, where he
recently took up a full-time post at what is widely considered the leading
philosophy department in the Anglophone world; boxes of his belongings,
shipped over from Australia, lay unpacked around his living-room. Chalmers,
now 48, recently cut his hair in a concession to academic respectability, and
he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever. The zombie
scenario goes as follows: imagine that you have a doppelgnger. This person
physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he
or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely
as you do. The sole difference is that the doppelgnger has no consciousness;
this as opposed to a groaning, blood-spattered walking corpse from a movie
is what philosophers mean by a zombie.
Such non-conscious humanoids dont exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be
better to say that I know Im not one, anyhow; I could never know for certain
that you arent.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could.
Evolutionmight have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same
as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of
awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: Im talking to you now, and I can
see how youre behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly whats
going on in your brain yet it seems it could be consistent with all that
evidence that you have no consciousness at all. If you were approached by
me and my doppelgnger, not knowing which was which, not even the most
powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us apart. And the fact that one
can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness cant
just be made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be
something extra an additional ingredient in nature.
It would be understating things a bit to say that this argument wasnt
universally well-received when Chalmers began to advance it, most
prominently in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. The withering tone of the
philosopher Massimo Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have
been written attacking the zombie notion: Lets relegate zombies to B-movies
and try to be a little more serious about our philosophy, shall we? Yes, it may
be true that most of us, in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something

over and above our physical being as if your mind were a chauffeur inside
your own body, to quote the spiritual author Alan Watts. But to accept this as
a scientific principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we
know about the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things:
atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining. Above
all, critics point out, if this non-physical mental stuff did exist, how could it
cause physical things to happen as when the feeling of pain causes me to
jerk my fingers away from the saucepans edge?
Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this
spooky extra ingredient might be real. In the 1970s, at what was then the
National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, the neurologist Lawrence
Weiskrantz encountered a patient, known as DB, with a blind spot in his left
visual field, caused by brain damage. Weiskrantz showed him patterns of
striped lines, positioned so that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked
him to say whether the stripes were vertical or horizontal. Naturally, DB
protested that he could see no stripes at all. But Weiskrantz insisted that he
guess the answers anyway and DB got them right almost 90% of the time.
Apparently, his brain was perceiving the stripes without his mind being
conscious of them. One interpretation is that DB was a semi-zombie, with a
brain like any other brain, but partially lacking the magical add-on of
consciousness.
Chalmers knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in
his stride: at philosophy conferences, he is fond of clambering on stage to sing
The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness.
(I act like you act / I do what you do / But I dont know / What its like to be
you.) The conceit is: wouldnt it be a drag to be a zombie? Consciousness is
what makes life worth living, and I dont even have that: Ive got the zombie
blues. The song has improved since its debut more than a decade ago, when
he used to try to hold a tune. Now Ive realised it sounds better if you just
shout, he said.

***

PeIllustration by Peter Gamelen

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in modern philosophy, perhaps because of how baffling the problem is:
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opposing
combatants tend not merely to disagree, but to find each others
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positions manifestly preposterous. An admittedly extreme example concerns
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Consciousness
was described,in an article by his fellow philosopher Colin

McGinn in 2007, as banal and pointless, excruciating, absurd, running

the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad.
McGinn added, in a footnote: The review that appears here is not as I
originally wrote it. The editors asked me to soften the tone of the original
[and] I have done so. (The attack may have been partly motivated by a
passage in Honderichs autobiography, in which he mentions my small
colleague Colin McGinn; at the time, Honderich told this newspaper hed
enraged McGinn by referring to a girlfriend of his as not as plain as the old
one.)
McGinn, to be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong
feelings only slightly more politely expressed are commonplace. Not
everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with making the whole
debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett,
the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston,
argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isnt
anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff
doesnt actually give rise to something called consciousness. Common sense
may tell us theres a subjective world of inner experience but then common
sense told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat.
Consciousness, according to Dennetts theory, is like a conjuring trick: the
normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something
non-physical going on. To look for a real, substantive thing called
consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in
novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a
peculiar substance named fictoplasm; the idea is absurd and unnecessary,
since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the
debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither
camp can quite believe what the other is saying. To Dennetts opponents, he is
simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their
inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest. (Chalmers has
speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be a zombie.) Its like
asserting that cancer doesnt exist, then claiming youve cured cancer; more
than one critic of Dennetts most famous book, Consciousness Explained, has
joked that its title ought to be Consciousness Explained Away. Dennetts reply
is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he insists, is exactly what
scientists do. When physicists first concluded that the only difference between
gold and silver was the number of subatomic particles in their atoms, he
writes, people could have felt cheated, complaining that their special
goldness and silveriness had been explained away. But everybody now
accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just differences in atoms.
However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just

the physical brain, doing what brains do.

The history of science is full of cases where people thought a phenomenon
wasutterly unique, that there couldnt be any possible mechanism for it, that
we mightnever solve it, that there was nothing in the universe like it, said
Patricia Churchland of the University of California, a self-described
neurophilosopher and one of Chalmerss most forthright critics.
Churchlands opinion of the Hard Problem, which she expresses in caustic
vocal italics, is that it is nonsense, kept alive by philosophers who fear that
science might be about to eliminate one of the puzzles that has kept them
gainfully employed for years. Look at the precedents: in the 17th century,
scholars were convinced that light couldnt possibly be physical that it had
to be something occult, beyond the usual laws of nature. Or take life itself:
early scientists were convinced that there had to be some magical spirit
the lan vital that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But
there wasnt, of course. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label
we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually,
neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. Churchland
said: The history of science really gives you perspective on how easy it is to
talk ourselves into this sort of thinking that if my big, wonderful brain cant
envisage the solution, then it must be a really, really hard problem!
Solutions have regularly been floated: the literature is awash in references to
global workspace theory, ego tunnels, microtubules, and speculation
that quantum theory may provide a way forward. But the intractability of the
arguments has caused some thinkers, such as Colin McGinn, to raise an
intriguing if ultimately defeatist possibility: what if were just constitutionally
incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to
help us solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is
no particular reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big
philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become
known as mysterianism after the 1960s Michigan rocknroll band ? and
the Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the name from a work of Japanese
sci-fi but the essence of it is that theres actually no mystery to why
consciousness hasnt been explained: its that humans arent up to the job. If
we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be
physical, maybe thats because we are, to quote the American philosopher
Josh Weisberg, in the position of squirrels trying to understand quantum
mechanics. In other words: Its just not going to happen.

***

Or maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers,
Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a

viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except
among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of
the new age. This is panpsychism, the dizzying notion that everything in the
universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious
when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds
ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, I often
encounter blank stares of incomprehension. But when it comes to grappling
with the Hard Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard.
Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the
study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and
dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too well, where does it
stop?

Growing up as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund

named Purzel. According to the church, because he was a dog, that meant he
didnt have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured
he certainly gave every appearance of having a rich inner life. These days we
dont much speak of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human
brains are conscious that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. The
problem is that there seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or
sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. Since we dont
know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds
for assuming its only the brains of mammals that do so or even that
consciousness requires a brain at all. Which is how Koch and Chalmers have
both found themselves arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of
Books, that an ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind
you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle be conscious.
The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that
certain fundamental aspects of reality such as space, mass, or electrical
charge just do exist. They cant be explained as being the result of anything
else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that
consciousness could be like that, too and that if it is, there is no particular
reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.
Kochs specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and
psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, is narrower and more precise than traditional
panpsychism. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious,
providing that the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and
organised. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and
dogs, though their consciousness probably doesnt resemble ours. But in

principle the same might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a

thermostat. (The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe the same
care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals? Koch, for his part,
tries to avoid stepping on insects as he walks.)
Unlike the vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi
and Kochs integrated information theory has actually been tested. A team
of researchers led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain
with electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised how
integrated its neural circuits are. Sure enough, when people fall into a
deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into
unconsciousness, the device demonstrates that their brain integration
declines, too. Among patients suffering locked-in syndrome who are as
conscious as the rest of us levels of brain integration remain high; among
patients in coma who arent it doesnt. Gather enough of this kind of
evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure the
complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it
was conscious.
But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone
could be conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the
smartphone itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged. Its like black
holes, he said. Ive never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no
experience of black holes. But the theory [that predicts black holes] seems
always to be true, so I tend to accept it.
Illustration by Peter Gamelen

It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually
to vanquish the Hard Problem. On the one hand, it wouldnt require a belief
in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics
would escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldnt need to
accept the strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesnt exist, when
its so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, its
everywhere. The universe is throbbing with it.
Last June, several of the most prominent combatants in the consciousness
debates including Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett boarded a tallmasted yacht for a trip among the ice floes of Greenland. This conference-atsea was funded by a Russian internet entrepreneur, Dmitry Volkov, the
founder of the Moscow Centre for Consciousness Studies. About 30
academics and graduate students, plus crew, spent a week gliding through
dark waters, past looming snow-topped mountains and glaciers, in a bracing
chill conducive to focused thought, giving the problem of consciousness

another shot. In the mornings, they visited islands to go hiking, or examine

the ruins of ancient stone huts; in the afternoons, they held conference
sessions on the boat. For Chalmers, the setting only sharpened the urgency of
the mystery: how could you feel the Arctic wind on your face, take in the
visual sweep of vivid greys and whites and greens, and still claim conscious
experience was unreal, or that it was simply the result of ordinary physical
stuff, behaving ordinarily?
The question was rhetorical. Dennett and Churchland were not converted;
indeed, Chalmers has no particular confidence that a consensus will emerge
in the next century. Maybe therell be some amazing new development that
leaves us all, now, looking like pre-Darwinians arguing about biology, he
said. But it wouldnt surprise me in the least if in 100 years, neuroscience is
incredibly sophisticated, if we have a complete map of the brain and yet
some people are still saying, Yes, but how does any of that give you
consciousness? while others are saying No, no, no that just is the
consciousness! The Greenland cruise concluded in collegial spirits, and
mutual incomprehension.
It would be poetic albeit deeply frustrating were it ultimately to prove that
the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An
answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one
could argue that nothing else could ever matter more since anything at all
that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious
brains. Yet theres no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate
vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a
solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience
meets philosophy, we would even recognise that wed found it.
Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread
This article was amended on 21 January 2015. The conference-at-sea was
funded by the Russian internet entrepreneur Dmitry Volkov, not Dmitry
Itskov as was originally stated. This has been corrected.