People have been perplexed by the brain’s capacity to produce awareness for millennia. The potential for each of us to have subjectivity—the capacity to experience, feel, and think—lays at the heart of the consciousness conundrum. We don’t “dwell in the dark” when we are awake, unlike when we are unconscious or in a profound slumber that is dreamless. Instead, we are experiencing the world and ourselves. But how the brain generates the conscious experience and which part of the brain is in charge are still unknown.
Dr. Nir Lahav, an Israeli physicist from Bar-Ilan University, claims that “This is quite a mystery since it seems that our conscious experience cannot arise from the brain, and in fact, cannot arise from any physical process.” As absurd as it may sound, there is no neuronal activity that can be observed to represent or explain conscious experience in the brain.
“Think about it this way, when I feel happiness, my brain will create a distinctive pattern of complex neural activity. This neural pattern will perfectly correlate with my conscious feeling of happiness, but it is not my actual feeling. It is just a neural pattern that represents my happiness. That’s why a scientist looking at my brain and seeing this pattern should ask me what I feel, because the pattern is not the feeling itself, just a representation of it.”
Dr. Zakaria Neemeh, a philosopher from the University of Memphis
Because of this, we are unable to attribute any brain activity to the conscious experience of what we detect, feel, and think. Only connections to these experiences are possible.
We have overwhelming evidence—grounded in more than a century of neuroscience—that the brain is the source of our conscious skills. So how is it possible that these conscious experiences cannot be explained by any neuronal complex activity and cannot be located anyplace in the brain (or the body)?
The hard problem of consciousness is the name given to this enigma. Since it is so challenging, philosophers were the only ones who spoke about it until a few decades ago. There is still no good theory that adequately describes consciousness and offers a solution to this challenging issue, despite the fact that we have made enormous progress in our knowledge of the neuroscientific underpinnings of consciousness.
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