“Answering the Hard Question of Consciousness: “And Then What Happens?”
Cole Porter wrote what could be seen as a love song to consciousness: “You do something to me, something that simply mystifies me.” Progress on theories of consciousness depends on asking, and answering, the Hard Question: what exactly does conscious experience do to me, and what does that allow/cause/permit/provoke me to do, and who or what is this me that conscious experience does something to? Most theories of consciousness are strikingly incurious about these questions, but there is a deep reason why they are hard to answer scientifically. Still, we can answer them. They are puzzles, not mysteries.