Start with a sensation you have probably had and probably dismissed: the feeling when looking at a forest or a river or a night sky, that the thing in front of you is not merely a thing. Not that it is alive in the way you are alive, not that it has thoughts or intentions or feelings you could name, but that there is something it is like to be it, some interiority that your gaze is meeting even if it cannot understand what it meets. Most people learn to dismiss this feeling e

David Chalmers gave philosophy one of its most useful formulations when he distinguished the easy problems of consciousness from the hard one. The easy problems concern function: explaining how the brain integrates information, how it discriminates stimuli, how it produces reports about internal states. The hard problem is different. It asks why any of this processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to see red, to feel pain, t