The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes (The Truth Series Book 12)

by Thomas Stark

He wrote, “The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods. ... The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. ... When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.” What Chalmers is actually talking about is the hard problem of sentience, not of consciousness. All animals and human babies are sentient, but none is conscious. They have plenty of experiences, feelings, intuitions, and so on – a whole world of empirical content and percepts of various kinds – but all without the benefit of consciousness. Sentience concerns the experience itself (the content; the empirical percept; the feeling), but consciousness concerns reflecting on the experience and establishing its intelligible aspect (the form; the rational concept)....