Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

It is easy to be flippant about the hard problem. In the past, my own response may have seemed so. When asked, I would often say that conscious experience is merely what it feels like when a certain kind of information processing takes place in the brain. But because the core issue is to explain how there can be a “what it feels like” at all, the response too quickly dismisses the hard problem as not being hard and not even being a problem. More charitably, it is a response that sides with a widely held view that thinks too much is made of thought. While some hard-problem aficionados argue that to understand consciousness we will need to introduce concepts from outside conventional science, others—so-called physicalists—anticipate that cleverly construed and creatively applied, traditional scientific methods, solely invoking physical properties of matter, will be up to the task. The physicalist perspective does indeed summarize my own long-held view.