The study of consciousness in modern philosophy of mind reveals a basic explanatory
discrepancy between subjective qualia and objective brain substrates. The hard problem of
consciousness, as stated by Chalmers, contends that no merely physical explanation can
adequately explain why or how subjective experience emerges, notwithstanding physicalist
paradigms that hold that mental states supervene upon neurobiological processes.
Panpsychist interpretations of this epistemic gap, in which consciousness is postulated as an
inherent characteristic of matter itself, reinterpret cognition as basic within a reorganised
physical ontology rather than as emergent.