“What Am I — Qualia, Brahman, Neurons, or just Nothing?”
The Western analytical philosophy of mind focuses on the mind-body problem. It examines whether subjective experience can be reduced to physical brain activity. This branch covers David Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness, thought experiments on qualia (Mary's Room) and behavior without awareness (Philosophical Zombies), and mathematical attempts to quantify consciousness like Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
David Chalmers distinguished the 'easy problems' of explaining brain functions (attention, processing) from the 'hard problem.' The hard problem is: why does any brain function have an accompanying subjective feel? Why is the processing not completely 'in the dark'?
Qualia are the subjective, qualitative properties of experience, like the taste of chocolate or the redness of red. Thought experiments like Jackson's 'Mary's Room' argue that you can know all physical facts about color vision and still learn something new when you actually see color, suggesting physicalism is incomplete.
Giulio Tononi's theory proposes that consciousness is a fundamental property of physical systems, measured by the mathematical value Phi (Φ). Consciousness is identical to the amount of integrated information in a system, implying that consciousness is graded and widespread.
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