It seems trivially true that the felt quality of redness is different than the observed interactions of neurons. To see this, we simply have to imagine a red patch, and compare that to any possible interactions between the physical constituents composing our brain. The two are not identical. Intuitively then, it seems as if the world can be separated into the mental and the physical, the belief in which can be called mind/body dualism.
So what do I mean by "the felt quality of redness"? We might imagine that while looking at a red flower, we are in a way peering out through our eyes at the flower. This view is generally rejected as it brings to mind a tiny person behind our eyes, and another behind his, ad infinitum. This when we know vision to be the result of the interaction of light with our eyes, which triggers a chain reaction of neurons. What seems left out of that explanation is what can be called the phenomenal character of e.g. redness, or in less technical terms: the felt quality of redness or the experience of redness.
Now while our experience of seeing a red rose may seem different than the neural correlates thereof, there is some reason to think they must nevertheless be the same in some sense. The brain seems to be a closed causal system, which is to say that there is no room for mental properties and physical properties to interact: consciousness seems superfluous. The prospect of existent but non-interacting mental properties is perhaps even more problematic, as then it would seem impossible for us to be able to speak of mental properties at all.
So the problem often referred to as the Hard Problem of Consciousness, is the problem of accounting for the apparent lack of identity between the mental and the physical. Currently there is no academic consensus as to what strategy is best for doing so, though many have been proposed. So the question remains open.
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