On the "Hard Problem" of Consciousness and Being One with Everything

Human consciousness is a major puzzle for physicists and philosophers. It is not the same as awareness, which is common to all living things and seems to be explainable by comparatively well-known brain mechanisms.  Consciousness includes an element of subjective feelings that so far has defied explanation. Scientists know it exists and think it is generated in the brain, but they can’t figure out how. This is what philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness (awareness is the easy problem). He calls this subjective element conscious experience. He explains it here:

When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.