In 1995, the philosopher, David Chalmers, gave the deepest problem in this series a name that has stuck: the hard problem of consciousness. The easy problems, by comparison, are the ones that neuroscience is making genuine progress on: how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, produces reportable behaviour.

Here is a question that makes a great many scientists uncomfortable: if consciousness is simply what the brain does, what happens to it when the brain stops? Not in a vague, hopeful sense. In a specific, documented, published-in-The-Lancet sense.

Here is a fact that most people encounter in undergraduate physics and immediately file away under 'weird quantum stuff that doesn't affect real life': an electron does not have a definite position until it interacts with something else. Not unknown, but undefined. It exists as a superposition of possibilities, a smear of potential, until a relationship is formed. At that point a value crystallises. Not because we looked. Because something else in the universe entered into re

I come to this as someone with a deep investment in philosophy of mind and relational ontology, and as a shamanic practitioner who has sat with people navigating the territory between life and death. This is not an abstract question for me. It is one of the most urgent questions there is. And it deserves better than either the credulity of true believers or the reflexive dismissiveness of those who have decided the answer before examining the evidence.