Knowing what consciousness is, and how it came about, is crucial to understanding our place in the universe and what we do with our lives. —Giulio Tononi

Since the dawn of humanity, people have struggled to understand the three great mysteries of existence—God, free will, and consciousness. Let’s explore consciousness today.

Consciousness is commonly understood as the awareness an individual has of their own thoughts, memories, or perceptions—along with the recognition that they possess them. This awareness gives rise to a sense of self and personal agency. It includes both the perception of the external environment (“It’s snowing”) and the awareness of internal states (“I’m happy”).

Philosopher David Chalmers of New York University, in 1995, famously referred to consciousness as "the hard problem” in philosophy, challenging the assumption that the subjective feeling of consciousness can be explained by analyzing the neuroanatomy of the brain. [1]. “I’d be happy,” he said a few years later, “if we got to the point where, say, in 50 or 100 years we at least have some candidate theories (of consciousness), serious, well-developed mathematical theories that are consistent with the data… But we’re not even close to that point yet.”

The challenge lies in the apparent disconnect between the subjective, first-person experience of consciousness and the objective experimental evidence, measurements, and duplicatable framework that relies solely on the fundamental laws of Newtonian physics. This is the hard problem.

Since Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, helped establish consciousness as a legitimate subject........

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