Consciousness

David Chalmers distinguished the 'easy' problems of consciousness (explaining behavior, integration of information) from the 'hard' problem: why does subjective experience exist? Why does processing information feel like something? Physicalism says consciousness emerges from matter, but cannot explain the explanatory gap. Dualism preserves the intuition but creates the interaction problem. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness is identical to integrated information (phi), giving it a mathematical foundation. Panpsychism suggests experience is fundamental to matter itself. The debate remains one of the deepest open questions in philosophy and science.