Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

by Annaka Harris

Galen Strawson makes a similar point by turning the mystery of consciousness on its head. He argues that consciousness is in fact the only thing in the universe that is not a mystery—in the sense that it is the only thing we truly understand firsthand. According to Strawson, it is matter that’s utterly mysterious, because we have no understanding of its intrinsic nature. And he has dubbed this “the hard problem of matter”: [Physics] tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations . . . but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure. Physics is silent—perfectly and forever silent—on this question. . . . What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don’t know—except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.