The Physics of Consciousness

Scientists have long asked one of the deepest questions in all of science: how does the physical BRAIN give rise to the felt experience of being alive and aware? This question is so challenging that philosopher David Chalmers famously called it the HARD PROBLEM of consciousness. Consciousness means your subjective, first-person experience — the redness you see in a red apple, the sting you feel from a paper cut, the joy you feel hearing your favorite song. Physics, the science of matter and energy, is now being used as a new LENS to investigate how awareness might emerge from physical processes inside the brain. Researchers want to know whether the laws of physics can explain not just what the brain does, but why there is something it FEELS like to be you.