The puzzle of how our minds relate to our bodies has captivated thinkers since ancient times, and today it assumes fresh urgency as we strive to create artificial intelligence and perhaps even artificial consciousness. Two principal positions define the debate: monism and dualism. Monism asserts that only one kind of substance or property exists, whether physical or mental. Within this perspective, we will now focus on idealism, which contends that reality is essentially mental in nature. Dualism, however, takes a different approach entirely, arguing that mental and physical phenomena constitute two genuinely separate categories of existence. Substance dualism treats mental and physical substances as entirely separate, whereas property dualism allows that mental properties may emerge from physical substrates but remain irreducible to them. Epiphenomenalism offers a curious variant: mental states arise from physical processes but lack any causal power. Somewhere between monist and dualist theories lies panpsychism, which suggests that consciousness represents a fundamental property distributed throughout all matter. A central challenge threading through all these debates is the problem of qualia—the subjective, first-person aspects of experience that objective descriptions cannot fully capture. As we approach the possibility of creating artificial minds, these classical questions about consciousness become more than academic exercises: the theoretical framework we choose for understanding human consciousness will inevitably shape how we approach machine consciousness and whether we believe such a goal is even coherent.