This is

This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds

Philosophy Bites is unfunded. Please help us keep it going by subscribing or donating at

W.w.w.com

or you can become a patron at Patreon.

Take the sound of this podcast.

What does it sound like to you?

A podcast is not just a series of sound waves, it has a subjective impact.

That is, there is something it is like for you to hear the podcast.

It may sound different to how somebody else hears it.

But how can we make sense of this subjectivity, of this rich inner life of sounds and

tastes and smells.

A former philosophy by its interviewee David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness.

Keith Frankish agrees it's hard but thinks he may have a solution.

Keith Frankish, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you for inviting me.

The topic we're going to focus on is the hard problem and the illusion of qualia. What is the hard problem?

Well, consciousness I think everyone agrees is weird.

It's a very important thing. It's perhaps the thing that we're most intimately

familiar with and it seems very very hard to explain. The hard problem is

precisely explaining it.

Somehow, brains produce consciousness, the rich variety of sensory experiences,

...