The hard problem of consciousness is not a just little local difficulty that will be solved by advances in neuroscience. As Thomas Nagel said, ‘it invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history’. 

It was David Chalmers who first proposed a distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ problems of consciousness – a distinction which has been problematic ever since. It gives too much ground to those who believe neural and computational science explain consciousness key aspects of consciousness. And it is biased towards the perspective that there are parts of the mind that entirely belong to the physical world and are no more than physical way stations in the causal chain between sensory inputs and behavioural outputs.