C1 Reading Test – Philosophy of Consciousness & the Hard Problem

Read the passage and decide if each statement is True (T), False (F), or Not Given (NG).

Philosophers distinguish between the “easy problems” of consciousness—explaining functions like attention, report, or behavioral control—and the “hard problem”: why and how subjective experience arises at all. Brain science has progressed on the former with models such as global workspace theory and predictive processing, which describe how information becomes available for flexible use and how the brain generates expectations to interpret input. Yet critics argue that even perfect accounts of access and control leave an explanatory gap: they tell us what the system does, not why it feels like something to be that system.

Physicalists typically claim that conscious experience will, in principle, be explained wholly in physical terms once our theories mature. Some take an eliminativist route, suggesting that the sense of an inner glow—qualia—is a cognitive illusion produced by how attention summarizes and tags information. Others adopt “realist” strategies that stay within naturalism: higher-order theories propose that experience requires a representation of one’s own mental states; neurobiological approaches search for specific mechanisms, such as recurrent activity in certain cortical loops.

By contrast, property dualists hold that physical descriptions miss an intrinsic feature of experience and thus require new fundamental properties or laws. A contemporary variant, panpsychism, treats consciousness as widespread—perhaps basic to matter—so that complex minds assemble from simpler experiential units. Critics complain that such views risk explanatory inflation: they place experience everywhere without showing how micro-experiences compose into the unified perspective we enjoy.

Methodologically, many researchers now emphasize “bridging constraints.” Any theory should (i) align with established neural data, (ii) predict dissociations—cases where report, attention, or wakefulness come apart—and (iii) avoid unfalsifiable posits. Cross-species studies and clinical cases (locked-in syndrome, anesthesia awareness) are informative precisely because they stress-test the link between function and felt presence. The meta-lesson is cautious: progress may arrive not through a single decisive argument, but by narrowing the space of possibilities until only those accounts that track evidence and clarity remain.