Who Is Thinking?

In 1998, philosopher David Chalmers made a bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch about whether, in the next 25 years, any scientist would be able to offer a persuasive and precise explanation for how our messy, spongy brains give rise to the feeling of awareness. Koch wagered that the puzzle could be solved. Four years earlier, Chalmers was a somewhat disheveled postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. He sent an abstract to the first Science of Consciousness meeting, hoping simply to present his research on a conference poster. Instead, he found himself on the main stage, where he delivered a characterization of the problem of studying consciousness that, even today, remains central to the field—namely, that there are many relatively easy problems to solve (how things like perception, cognition, and decision-making work, neuroscientifically), and one “hard problem”: determining why any of those electrical, neural, and molecular stories should lead to what it feels like to be you.