Is the hard problem of consciousness as hard as it seems? Can we rely on science to solve it, or must we look elsewhere for satisfactory answers? Philip Goff repsonds to Peter Vickers' recent IAI News piece. Read Bernardo Kastrup's response here. 

It’s broadly agreed that consciousness poses a profound challenge to contemporary science: a ‘hard problem’ as David Chalmers famously put it. Some theorists, including myself, think we need to radically rethink our scientific picture of the universe in order to solve it. Others think we should plug away with our standard methods of investigating the brain and gradually chip away at the problem until one day we wake up to find the problem’s no longer there.

Peter Vickers, in an interesting recent piece for IAI, takes a nuanced middle way. We should recognize that the hard problem is a philosophical problem and that as such it should be sharply distinguished from problems that can be tackled with scientific methods. In terms of the latter, we can gather hard evidence that may ultimately command consensus; we are sometimes even able to settle matters and thereby add to the body of knowledge we teach to our undergraduates.