Have you ever been sitting, chatting with a group of friends, and suddenly stop and think: I’m alive, I’m real, these are my friends i’m with right now. Most people have felt it, not many people talk about it.
Consciousness is known as the state of being aware of yourself and your surroundings, but more simply it’s what turns existing into actually experiencing.
However, scientists have broken it down into two main things
- Access consciousness:
The information your brain makes available to you. When you notice a sound or recall a memory or feel hungry, that information becomes conscious. Your brain has thousands of processes running at the same time, but only some of them surface. Access consciousness is the surfacing
- Phenomenal consciousness:
The feeling of it. Not just that you noticed the sound, but that it sounded like something. This is the part nobody can explain. This is where the hard problem lives.
Most animals have some version of access consciousness – they respond ot their environment, learn things, avoid danger. But phenomenal consciousness, whether there’s something about what it’s like to be a dog, or fish
The annoying thing is, you can’t actually prove anyone else is conscious. You know you are because you experience it directly, but everyone else. You’re just assuming, and you can never get inside of their minds to verify. That’s called the problem of other minds — and it’s been bothering philosophers for centuries.
The Hard Problem
Scientists can map every neuron in your brain. They can watch it light up when you feel joy, pain, sadness. But they can’t explain why, why does any of it feel like anything? (why does pain hurt rather than just trigger a response)
Thats what philosopher David Chalmers called the Hard Problem of Consciousness- and it remains unsolved to this day
You could theoretically build a robot that reacts to damage – pulls its hand away from fire, avoids sharp objects. But it wouldn’t feel anything. It would just be processing information and responding.
So why do you feel something? What’s the different between you and that robot
Thats the hard problem, it’s not asking how the brain works. It’s asking why brain activity produces an inner experience at all.
Chalmers called it ‘hard’ not because it’s complicated, but because it’s a completely different type of question to everything else in science, where the answer can usually be found in data.
And you’ve already felt it.
That moment with your friends, thats the hard problem making itself known. It even has a name: existential shock
This is when your brain briefly becomes aware of itself being aware. Normally we run on autopilot without fully registering what it’s doing, then suddenly the autopilot drops and you’re hit with the full weight of your own existence.
The reason it happens is your default mode network – the part of your brain that handles self-referential thinking. Your sense of ‘I’, your memories, relationships, your place in the world. It usually hums quietly in the background. Existential shock is when it suddenly surges to the front.
It tends to happen in:
- Quiet or still moments
- times of anxiety or stress
- Big life transitions
- Sleep deprivation
- Sometimes completely randomly
It feels so strange because we feel completely aware of our surroundings, and that’s not normal for us.
In 2001, neurologist Marcus Raichle and his team noticed something unexpected- when participants weren’t doing anything, a specific network of brain regions stayed consistently active. They called it the default mode network. It never switches off, it just turns inwards. It’s always running a quiet background programme about you. Existential shock is when that programme stops being quiet
Most of the time we aren’t present in our own lives. Existential shock is the rare moment we actually are. In fact, it’s the involuntary version of what mediation tries to do deliberately.
Consciousness is always there – it’s just the most of the time, our lives are too busy to notice it
