Consciousness is one of the biggest philosophical questions we know of. David Chalmers says that consciousness has two issues: the easy question of consciousness and the hard question of consciousness. The former, while not easy per se, is much easier than the latter. The easy question has to do with everything that neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and so on, all pay attention to with questions such as: what are the neural correlates of perception, memory, belief, cognition, emotion, intuition, behavior, etc. and how can they be manipulated? How does thought/perception occur and how does it go wrong (e.g., cognitive biases, perceptual illusions)? How do thoughts/perceptions influence behavior? How are thoughts and behaviors shaped by biology and culture? Is the brain like a computer? And so on. These are all questions that we are relatively certain can be answered within the purview of these fields. Even if it is difficult to find the answers, we can be confident they have answers that will eventually be discovered. The hard question, however, is essentially this: how is it that non-conscious physical matter can give rise to conscious experience?
