An icebreaker
A philosopher named a puzzle that had lingered for decades: explaining brain function is hard but tractable, while explaining why any of it feels like something from the inside seems different in kind. Not everyone agrees the distinction is real.
In a 1995 paper he distinguished the 'easy problems' of explaining brain function from the 'hard problem' of why any of it is accompanied by subjective experience at all. He argued no purely physical account explains that gap.
In his widely cited 1974 essay, he argued that no physical description of a bat's echolocation could capture what it's actually like to be that bat. Subjective point of view, he held, resists translation into objective, third-person facts.
He argued for decades that consciousness itself functions as a kind of user-illusion, and that once you explain all the brain's functions, there's no further mystery left over to solve. He called the hard problem a confusion rather than a real gap.
He argued a scientist raised in a black-and-white room, who knew every physical fact about color vision, would still learn something new on first seeing red — proof, he claimed, that physical facts don't exhaust experience. He later reversed this view and rejected his own conclusion.
In Conscious (2019) she argued that awareness seems to bear witness to much of what a person does rather than steer it, and that the felt sense of being one continuous self may be a rare form of consciousness. She held that panpsychism deserves a serious hearing.