When Jane Fonda was interviewed by David Frost more than 40 years ago, she explained the goal of the actor–and of anyone trying to understand consciousness: “If you asked me what’s the one thing in the whole world I would like more than anything else, it’s for even fifty seconds to be able to–pow–be in someone’s head and just see the world through his eyes.” 

To that goal, I think we’re still wandering in the Dark Ages, though not everyone agrees. The opening of “The Mental Block,” Michael Hanlon’s Aeon essay about solving the “hard problem”:

“Over there is a bird, in silhouette, standing on a chimney top on the house opposite. It is evening; the sun set about an hour ago and now the sky is an angry, pink-grey, the blatting rain of an hour ago threatening to return. The bird, a crow, is proud (I anthropomorphise). He looks cocksure. If it’s not a he then I’m a Dutchman. He scans this way and that. From his vantage point he must be able to see Land’s End, the nearby ramparts of Cape Cornwall, perhaps the Scillies in the fading light.

What is going on? What is it like to be that bird? Why look this way and that? Why be proud? How can a few ounces of protein, fat, bone and feathers be so sure of itself, as opposed to just being, which is what most matter does?

Old questions, but good ones. Rocks are not proud, stars are not nervous. Look further than my bird and you see a universe of rocks and gas, ice and vacuum. A multiverse, perhaps, of bewildering possibility. From the spatially average vantage point in our little cosmos you would barely, with human eyes alone, be able to see anything at all; perhaps only the grey smudge of a distant galaxy in a void of black ink. Most of what is is hardly there, let alone proud, strutting, cock-of-the-chimney-top on an unseasonably cold Cornish evening.

We live in an odd place and an odd time, amid things that know that they exist and that can reflect upon that, even in the dimmest, most birdlike way. And this needs more explaining than we are at present willing to give it. The question of how the brain produces the feeling of subjective experience, the so-called ‘hard problem.’ is a conundrum so intractable that one scientist I know refuses even to discuss it at the dinner table. Another, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland, declared in 1989 that ‘nothing worth reading has been written on it’. For long periods, it is as if science gives up on the subject in disgust. But the hard problem is back in the news, and a growing number of scientists believe that they have consciousness, if not licked, then at least in their sights.”