What makes consciousness such a vexing problem for scientists and philosophers?
While just about everyone agrees that the hard problem seems hard, many researchers — especially within the physicalist camp — believe it will eventually fade away. They draw an analogy with the debates that raged in the 19th century over the nature of life. What was it, people wondered, that made living things alive? Was there some kind of life force, an élan vital (as French philosophers called it)? Well, no. Instead, we came to recognize that “life” refers to a cluster of properties — metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis, and so on. Anil Seth suspects that the puzzle of consciousness will one day “dissolve” in the same way.
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