Consciousness
This theme runs through several big questions. Here are the ones where it plays out.
The questions that illuminate it
What gives morality its authority?
Everyone feels that some things are simply not done, but where does that demand get its force? If the good is grounded in God, a society that loses its faith risks losing its morality too, and the line ascribed to Dostoevsky looms: if God does not exist, everything is permitted. If morality rests on reason, on feeling, or on an inherited agreement, it survives secularization, but it remains to be explained why it still binds those who no longer want to play along. To take a position is to say what really upholds our duties, and what would be left of them the day that support gives way.
Should we examine our inner life, or fulfill ourselves first and foremost through action?
Turning inward sheds light on who we are, but can slide into rumination far from the world; throwing oneself into action accomplishes much, but risks dodging the question of who is acting, and for what. To take a position is to say where the self is truly found: in the return to oneself, or in what one does.
Could a machine ever truly think?
If thinking is only a matter of organization, a machine could genuinely think, and we might owe it something. If running a program is not enough, our machines merely imitate, though an artifact of another kind might one day succeed. And if thought is inseparable from life, the most brilliant machine will remain a thing. To take a position is to say what makes a mind.
What makes me remain myself through time?
What makes me the same person as the child in the old photographs, or as the one I will be in thirty years? If nothing stable endures, promises, remorse, and pride in a past self lose their footing; if a core remains, no change ever truly remakes me. To take a position is to say what exactly we are holding onto when we say "me."
Can a science of the brain fully explain lived experience?
Pain, the red I see, the taste of coffee: cognitive science describes ever more finely the brain mechanisms that accompany them, but does it explain what it is like to undergo them? To take a position is to say whether lived experience is a mechanism like any other, an illusion of introspection, or the sign that the mind exceeds anything neuroscience will ever grasp.