Science
Consciousness
You see colors, feel pain and love people. Science can map the brain, but it still can't say why any of that feels like something.
Brain activity is easy to see
Scanners can show which parts of your brain light up when you see red or stub your toe. What they can't show is the experience itself.
The gap
Every arrow can be traced through nerves and neurons. But why the signal arrives as an experience, felt from the inside, is a different question. No one has answered it.
“It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises.
The hard problem
Chalmers named this the hard problem of consciousness. Thirty years on, it is still open.
- You thinkYou reason about what is true.
- You chooseYou weigh options and decide.
- You loveYou care about other people.
What Christianity says
The Bible says God is a mind, and He made people in His image. On that view, it isn't strange that the universe contains minds. They come from the first Mind.
Your inner life is the plainest fact about you, and science can't explain it. Christianity says it's there because God made you to know Him.
God created man in his own image. In God’s image he created him; male and female he created them.