CONCEPT
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Chalmers's 1995 distinction between the easy problems of cognitive function and the hard problem of why there is subjective experience at all — the conceptual instrument that makes the AI consciousness debate tractable.
The hard problem of consciousness is David Chalmers's name for the single question that the sciences of mind cannot reduce to any other question. The easy problems — attention, memory, discrimination, report, behavioral integration — are difficult but tractable: they concern cognitive functions that can in principle be explained by specifying the mechanisms that perform them. The hard problem is different in kind. It asks why any physical process is accompanied by subjective experience — why there is something it is like to be the organism performing the function. A system could in principle execute every cognitive operation we perform and leave this question untouched. The hard problem is the load-bearing distinction of the Chalmers framework and the conceptual hinge on which the AI consciousness debate turns.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The formulation emerged from Chalmers's 1995 paper Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness and was developed in The Conscious Mind