Introduction: Performance and Consciousness

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Introduction:Performance and Consciousness Peter Zazzali, Guest Editor (bio) In referencing his latest drama, The Hard Problem, Tom Stoppard claims how human beings “account for consciousness”: Most things are not conscious. This table we are sitting at isn’t conscious. Vegetables aren’t conscious. We are conscious, and nobody understands how we do that; physically, scientifically or metaphysically. Nobody really knows; and that’s the ‘hard problem.’1 Coined by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, the “hard problem” of consciousness has perplexed human beings throughout history. How we interpret and comprehend the natural world in relationship to its spiritual opposite, our physical experience compared to the psychological, and the corporeal relative to the phenomenal has challenged neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, biologists, and theologians for centuries. As Chalmers argues, “there can be no wholly reductive explanation of consciousness,” a conceit that speaks to t

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