There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’

A fierce debate is raging around the slippery notion of consciousness. It retraces a trotted pattern of cultural resistance: We humans are often scared by anything that may disturb our image of ourselves. 

Famously, Darwin’s realization that we have common ancestors with all living organisms on our planet met ferocious resistance. Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. The cultural history of modernity is dotted by similar ideological rearguard battles, wherein old worldviews fight in retreat against novel knowledge to save some concept held dear. Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls.

During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul. The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter. Angels were souls without a body and so were people after their material death. The soul, taken to be immortal and created by God, was understood as the repository of memories, emotions and our subjectivity. It could speak and fall in love. It was the agent of our agency; the subject of our freedom; the entity that bore responsibility, culpability, virtue and value; and deserved to be judged, saved or damned.

The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves and by the long, slow effort to update them with our new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries. 

Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist. 

The functioning of our own body and brain is among the phenomena we understand the least and are curious about the most. This is the proper intellectual space where the “problem of consciousness” is located. That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. 

Updating the understanding of a phenomenon is not to deny it. Sunsets were understood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the descent of the sun in its daily motion over the Earth. Today, we understand them as a result of the Earth’s rotation, which turns us toward its shady side, where the sun gradually becomes no longer visible. Such an update in understanding does not make sunsets illusory or unreal. 

Similarly, our soul won’t become illusory or unreal if we get a better sense of how our brain functions. We can still call our soul our “soul,” even if we understand ourselves better. I call it so, because this notion — the soul — is dear to my soul.

The ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’

The consciousness debate is often formulated in terms used in an influential talk given by a young David Chalmers in Tucson in 1994. Chalmers, a philosopher, distinguished two separate “problems of consciousness.” The first is the very hard problem described above: understanding the processes in the brain that give rise to the many aspects of our visible behavior and our inner behavior that we can report about. Chalmers christened this hard problem as the “easy” problem of consciousness.  

Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. Today, this so-called “hard problem” is mentioned in all debates on consciousness. According to many, it unveils the very limits of current scientific understanding. Chalmers claimed that even after hypothetically accounting for our entire behavior, and for all our reports about our inner life, there would still be an “explanatory gap” between brain processes and experience.

“In the Renaissance, it was hard to accept that heaven and Earth are of the same nature; after Darwin, it was hard to accept that animals and humans are cousins; after recent advances in biology, it is hard to accept that living beings and inanimate matter are of the same nature.”

The idea of this supposed “explanatory gap” reincarnates in a number of related forms: explaining “qualia,” the hypothetical elementary bits of experience; explaining “subjectivity,” the very fact that some entity is capable of having experience at all; or explaining, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, “what is it like” to be the subject of a certain experience. 

I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand? 

But this curious claim has been enthusiastically embraced by crowds of thinkers, commentators and writers across many fields and worldviews, who have all jumped on the bandwagon of the “hard problem.” This widespread embrace is nourished by a strenuous resistance to an idea anticipated centuries ago by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza: that our soul could be a phenomenon of the same basic nature as any other phenomenon in nature. 

In the Renaissance, it was hard to accept that heaven and Earth are of the same nature; after Darwin, it was hard to accept that animals and humans are cousins; after recent advances in biology, it is hard to accept that living beings and inanimate matter are of the same nature.

The idea that we will never be able to understand consciousness upholds a worldview in which spirit and nature, subject and object, form distinct domains. Accepting that consciousness may not be separate from the physical world — that our beloved soul could be of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world — is too much for many.

Seeing The World From Within It

Chalmers claims that experience cannot be accounted for by science. But scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience. Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience, is not alternative to science; it is a main component of science’s traditional conceptual ground. As the Russian intellectual Alexander Bogdanov put it, science is the historical process of a successful collective organization of our experience. 

It is misleading to see science, as often naively portrayed, as a direct account of an absolute and objective world, observed and described from its outside. If we think in this manner, we introduce dualism. No surprise, then, that we find dualism down the road: an irreducible gap between subject and object of knowledge. We have introduced it upfront. 

What this view misses is the fact that we, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon. The source of the confusion about consciousness is the initial step: treating knowledge, consciousness and qualia as something to be derived from a scientific picture understood to be about something else. In fact, the scientific picture is a story about them. 

Experience is not over and above the processes that happen in the brain, as Chalmers assumed upfront. The dualism between a first-person description of experience and a third-person (or scientific) account of the same is a normal perspectival difference: the same brain phenomenon as experienced by that same brain itself, or by another. Experience for both — not evidence of two different kinds of reality. 

“Subjective experience,” “qualia” and “consciousness” are names of phenomena that of course appear differently from different perspectives. It would be strange if they didn’t. They affect the body and the brain embodying them differently from how they affect something interacting with them from the exterior. This is not due to a mysterious “explanatory gap.” “Red,” as a qualia, is the name of the process we generally undergo when we see or remember or think about the color red. We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call “cat” looks like a cat. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?

“The false ‘hard problem of consciousness’ assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body. This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.”

We do not have to derive a first-person perspective from an objective third-person view. It is the opposite: Any account is perspectival because knowledge is always embodied. Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious; it is just a special case of a perspective. What generates the apparent “metaphysical gap” and “explanatory gap” is mistaking scientific pictures for direct accounts of an ultimate reality.

‘Philosophical Zombies’

Chalmers asks us to contemplate what he calls a “philosophical zombie.” This is a hypothetical entity that looks and behaves like a human in all respects, including reporting emotions, feelings, dreams and experience, yet it has no consciousness. As Chalmers puts it, “There is nobody home.” This is a rhetorical trick that induces us to distinguish between behavior and a hypothetical reality accessible only by introspection. The very fact that a philosophical zombie could be conceived, Chalmers argues, shows that inner experience is intrinsically distinct from observable natural phenomena. 

But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating. 

My hypothetical, physically identical zombie twin would be exactly like me — including in experience. In other words, philosophical zombies are distinguishable from ordinary people only by those who assume upfront what Chalmers seeks to prove: that there is something non-physical going on in the world. They are not proving anything; they are examples of an unconvincing metaphysical possibility and nostalgia for the old notion of the transcendent soul.

The Soul Is Real & Is Part Of Nature

“Consciousness” and “experience” are names we use to denote events that happen inside us, that make us. No argument contradicts the possibility that what happens can be equally described, using other names, by a capable external observer. Today, we do not have an exhaustive external account, but this is not the same as having proof that no such account is possible.

The false “hard problem of consciousness” assumes upfront that there exists a metaphysical gap between mind and body. But this contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.

Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality. There are hinges between a representation and where it is embodied, and this may be a singular point in a representation, but it is not a metaphysical gap. It is not an explanatory gap.

So, there is no “hard problem of consciousness.” Our mental life can very well be of the same nature as any other phenomenon of the universe. The more interesting challenge is not to speculate about a “hard problem,” it is to try hard to understand more about the functioning of our brain and body without postulating that our soul is transcendent or different in kind from the rest of nature.

We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.

“It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics.”

If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics. 

The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.