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The Gap: Subjective Experience
But here’s where things get tricky: representing the mechanisms of emotions isn’t the same as experiencing them. This is the crux of the “hard problem of consciousness,” a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers. The hard problem asks: Why does any of this physical stuff—like chemical reactions or electrical signals in the brain—give rise to the subjective, first-person experience of what it feels like to be happy, sad, or afraid? We can simulate a brain down to the last neuron, but would that simulation actually feel anything, or would it just be a complex calculation mimicking the outward signs of emotion?