Why Are We Conscious of Anything?
The Hard Problem
The Inner Movie
If you are reading this, something extraordinary is happening. Not just neural firings. Not just electrochemical signals passing through grey matter. There is something it is like to read these words. You may experience an inner feeling. You may notice a subtle mood as you process the argument. That first-person perspective, the fact that there is an inner movie playing at all, is the deepest philosophical mystery of our age.
But where does it point?
1. The Data: There Is Something It Is Like
As Thomas Nagel famously argued, there is “something it’s like” to be a bat. And there is certainly something it’s like to be you.
These inner feels, of redness, pain, taste, longing, regret, are often called qualia. They are not publicly observable objects. They are not measurable quantities. They are private, first-person realities. You can describe the wavelength of red light. You can map neural correlates of pain. You can diagram taste receptors. But none of that captures what red looks like, what pain feels like, what chocolate tastes like. That gap is not a scientific ignorance gap.
It is a conceptual gap.
2. The Hard Problem
In 1996, David Chalmers gave this gap a name: the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
The easy problems ask: how does the brain integrate information? How does it control behaviour? How does it report internal states?
The hard problem asks: why does any of this processing feel like anything from the inside?
Why aren’t we one of Chalmers’ “philosophical zombies”, creatures physically identical to us, behaviourally indistinguishable, but with no inner experience? The very conceivability of such beings suggests that physics alone does not logically entail consciousness. And that creates pressure for naturalism.
3. What Naturalism Predicts
On naturalism, the fundamental layer of reality is non-conscious. Matter and energy obey blind mathematical laws. Complex arrangements emerge. Eventually brains appear. But here is the key question: if the base of reality is non-experiential, why should experience appear at all?
Notice what natural selection explains. It explains behaviour. It selects for survival-enhancing outputs. It does not select for felt experience as such. A robot could recoil from heat without feeling pain. A system could avoid predators without feeling fear. The adaptive work is done by functional organisation. The inner glow seems surplus. That does not strictly prove naturalism false. But it does make consciousness highly unexpected under it. In Bayesian terms: if naturalism is true, the probability of conscious experience emerging from wholly non-conscious ingredients is very surprising. If theism is true, if reality is grounded in Mind, then finite minds are not a surprise at all.
That asymmetry matters.
4. Mind to Mind
Theism begins not with dead matter but with a necessarily existent Mind. On that view, consciousness is not an inexplicable late arrival. It is derivative. Participatory. As Joshua Rasmussen has argued, if the foundation of reality includes mind, then limited mental subjects fit naturally within that framework; not as anomalies to be explained away, but as reflections of what was already there at the ground level.
The key move is this: theism does not merely assert that a mind exists somewhere in the universe. It asserts that mind is ontologically prior; that matter, space, and physical law are themselves grounded in and sustained by something irreducibly mental. On that picture, the emergence of conscious creatures is not a brute fact requiring a separate explanation. It is, in a sense, the natural overflow of what reality fundamentally is.
Under theism, the explanatory direction runs from Mind to minds. Under strict physicalism, it runs from non-mind to minds. The question then arises. Which of those transitions is metaphysically smoother?
5. Is This Just a “God of the Gaps”?
The usual objection appears quickly: “You’re just inserting God where science hasn’t yet explained consciousness”. No, this is not an argument from ignorance. It is an argument from ontology. Science can correlate brain states with experiences. It can map mechanisms. It can refine models. That is invaluable. But explaining mechanisms is not the same as explaining why there is experience rather than none.
No matter how detailed our neuroscience becomes, it will tell us which neural states correlate with which experiences. It will not tell us why those physical states are accompanied by any inner life at all. That question is not waiting on better data. It is not incomplete neuroscience. It is waiting on a different kind of answer, and it is one that naturalism struggles to answer on its own terms.
6. What About the Alternative Perspective?
Daniel Dennett is most notably associated with the naturalistic explanation of consciousness.
Dennett’s Argument: It’s Just Data Processing
Dennett argues that this magical, private inner movie doesn’t exist the way we think it does. He doesn’t deny that your brain does something when you look at a red apple. However, he believes our idea of “qualia”, this mysterious inner feeling, is an illusion. He believes “seeing red” is just a complex mechanical process. Your eyes take in light, your brain processes that data, and that data triggers your body to react or speak (like saying, “Wow, that apple is red!”). On this view, you aren’t experiencing a magical inner “redness”; your brain is just processing inputs and spitting out outputs, much like a computer.
The Critic’s Problem: He Changed the Subject
Critics point out that his answer completely dodges the actual question. The real question philosophers want to know is why we have feelings at all. A computer can process the wavelength of red light and print out the word “RED”, but the computer feels nothing. It is dark inside. Why do humans experience the red? Dennett simply explains how our brain’s wiring makes us talk about red. But explaining the wiring doesn’t explain why there is a raw, emotional feeling attached to it, why it actually feels like something to be human.
Mary’s Room
One way to look at this is through the Mary’s Room thought experiment, associated with philosopher Frank Jackson.
Imagine a brilliant scientist named Mary. Mary has lived her entire life in a completely black-and-white room. She has only ever seen black, white, and shades of grey. She investigates the world through a black-and-white television monitor. However, Mary is the world’s leading expert on the neurophysiology of vision. She knows every single physical fact there is to know about how we see the colour red. She knows the exact wavelength of red light, how it hits the retina, how the optic nerve sends signals to the brain, and how the brain processes that data to make a person say, “That is red”.
One day, the door to Mary’s room is opened, and she steps outside. For the first time in her life, she looks at a bright red apple. Now, does Mary learn something new? Most people instantly say, “Yes, of course she learns something new! She learns what red actually looks like”. If she does learn something new, then Dennett’s view is in trouble. Mary already knew 100% of the physical, data-processing facts. If experiencing the “redness” of red is a new piece of knowledge, then the inner feeling (qualia) must be something separate from, and beyond, just physical brain data.
The Philosophical Zombie
Forget Hollywood zombies looking for brains. A “Philosophical Zombie” (or p-zombie) looks and acts exactly like a normal human being. In fact, imagine a p-zombie that is an exact, atom-for-atom physical duplicate of you. Because its brain is wired exactly like yours, it processes information the same way. If you poke it with a needle, it will flinch, pull its hand away, and say “Ouch!”
Even though it behaves exactly like you and processes data exactly like you, however, it is completely “dark” inside. It has no conscious experience. When it says “Ouch”, it doesn’t feel the sting of pain. When it looks at a red apple, it processes the light waves, but it has no inner, visual experience of “redness”. Now, because we can clearly imagine a creature that processes data perfectly but feels nothing, it seems reasonable to argue that data processing and inner feeling must be two entirely different things. In other words, since we are not zombies (we feel the pain and see the red), there is an extra “magic ingredient” to human consciousness that the data-processing theory completely fails to explain.
7. Cumulative Force
When combined with the contingency of the universe, the fine-tuning of physical laws, the fine-tuning for discoverability, the unreasonable intelligibility of mathematics, the reliability of reason itself, psychophysical harmony, and much more, it becomes part of a pattern. Reality looks less like an accidental collision of particles and more like the expression of rational agency. Consciousness is not a glitch in the machine. It can be counted as strong evidence that the machine metaphor was wrong from the beginning.
8. A Bayesian Framing
The structure of the argument is simple:
Conscious experience exists. It is deeply unlike purely physical properties. Naturalism proposes a non-conscious foundation. Theism proposes a conscious foundation. Conscious experience is more expected if the foundation of reality is itself conscious. Therefore, consciousness raises the probability of theism over naturalism. It is very powerful evidence because it comes from the one thing we cannot doubt: the reality of our own awareness.
9. A Signpost, not a Mirage
If reality were fundamentally mindless, it is not at all obvious why it should ever light up from within. But it has. You are not merely a biochemical automaton. You are a centre of experience. If mind sits at the bottom of reality, that fact makes sense. In this sense, perhaps the deepest clue to the structure of the universe is not found in telescopes or particle accelerators, but in the quiet certainty that there is something it is like to be you.
Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams 