Consciousness is the primary and most immediate experience we all have. Before knowing our name or who we are, before being able to recognize any specific experience we are undergoing, the immediate realization that “I am” is always there.

Yet this fundamental first person experience sits uneasily within the context of our scientific third person description of the world. No doubt consciousness has somehow to do with the brain, since physical or chemical changes in the brain affect the contents of consciousness. But the contents of consciousness, e.g. the experience of the color red, are qualitatively different from and irreducible to patterns of excitation in the brain. This irreducible difference has been dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness.”