Consciousness has long remained one of the great mysteries of science and the human experience. For centuries, philosophers have been perplexed by how phenomena we encounter in our world give rise to our subjective conscious experiences.
Admitting that even if various cognitive and behavioral functions related to our experiences can be explained, Australian philosopher David Chalmers summarized the problem succinctly in 1995 when he asked, “Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” The essence of Chalmers’ question lies at the heart of what is called the hard problem of consciousness: why do we have phenomenal experiences, and what, precisely, gives rise to them?
Now, in a paper by coauthors Dr. Nir Lahav, a physicist from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Zachariah A. Neemeh with the Department of Philosophy at The University of Memphis, they argue that there may finally be a solution to this enduring question about the human experience, which involves the same relativistic principles presented by Einstein in his revolutionary theory of relativity more than a century ago.
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