Why do we have qualitative, subjective experiences at all? How does the brain, composed of physical matter, produce the felt sense of being a conscious entity? Why is there something it feels like to see the color red or feel pain, rather than these processes happening “in the dark” without any inner experience?
This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness, first articulated by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995.
While science has made great strides in understanding the physical processes of the brain, the question of how these processes give rise to our inner mental lives remains stubbornly elusive.
We may need to expand our scientific paradigms to incorporate consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality.