Consciousness & Mind
The "hard problem": even a complete physical account of the brain seems to leave unexplained why any of it is accompanied by felt experience.
Current explanations
Physicalism holds experience will reduce to brain processes; dualism and panpsychism deny full reduction; illusionism denies the explanandum. The debate is unresolved.
Research progress
Neural correlates of consciousness are increasingly well mapped, and theories like IIT and global workspace make testable predictions, but none closes the explanatory gap.
All that exists is physical, and every phenomenon — including mind — is ultimately constituted by physical processes described (in principle) by physi…
Subjective experience is a basic feature of reality not fully explained by, or derivable from, physical facts about the brain.
A system is conscious to the degree that it possesses integrated information (Φ); experience is identical to a maximally irreducible cause–effect stru…