The Long Way Back to Ourselves

8.4

The Hard Problem

This episode starts from Thomas Nagel's 1974 question "What is it like to be a bat?" and separates four states everyday language mixes together: wakefulness, attention, the self-model, and experience. At its core is David Chalmers' 1995 distinction between the "easy" problems of consciousness and the hard problem of why information processing is experienced from inside. Frank Jackson's 1982 thought experiment adds the color researcher Mary, who knows the complete physics of color yet seems to learn something new when she first sees red. Clinically, you hear about a woman in a vegetative state whose MRI scans, published by Adrian Owen in 2006, showed her following the instruction to imagine playing tennis.