In the first scene of The Hard Problem, Hilary, a doctoral student, challenges her tutor to explain consciousness. For him, it’s the brain’s perception of sensation—for example, the pain signal that travels from a burned finger to the brain. For her, that’s not enough: “What about sorrow?” There is no scientific definition that satisfactorily explains why we feel how we do about our own experiences. And Hilary isn’t the only person asking these questions—the ideological debate at the heart of Tom Stoppard’s drama is also the subject of much contemporary scientific debate.
Australian philosopher David Chalmers coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness.” In a 2014 TED talk, he explains that for most of the twentieth century, behavioral psychology studied human behavior while neuroscience studied human’s neurons and brain material. There was no crossover between the disciplines, as a scientific study of consciousness wasn’t considered possible or plausible. It has only been in the past 20 years that scientists and philosophers have started to confront what he calls “the hardest problem in science or philosophy.”
The easy problems are figuring out which parts of the brain are responsible for which processes: how we talk, or how we play chess. The hard problem is to explain why we have a subjective experience of those phenomena, which he compares to a 3-D movie playing inside your head. A computer or a robot doesn’t have that—or does it? Could it?
Some scientists think it’s possible, and are dedicated to developing a scientific theory of consciousness. Other researchers suggest that consciousness is fundamental, like space or time. An alternate theory, called panpsychism, holds that consciousness is universal, built into the atoms that make up the universe, which would mean that everything has a level of subjective feeling.
So, is the brain the material source of our consciousness? If one built “a computer simulating a human brain neuron by neuron,” as one of Stoppard’s biophysicists suggests, would it be conscious? Or does only the brain register consciousness? And if so, what is its source? Is it God, the soul, or something else? And what does all this suggest about goodness: is it ultimately a selfish learned behavior, or is it an attribute of our innate morality? These questions, unanswered by contemporary scientists or philosophers, animate Stoppard’s characters—their scientific study as well as their personal choices and more intimate sense of self.
—Taylor Barrett Gaines