Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness a Real Problem?

The hard problem of consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995, can be described as the challenge of explaining why conscious beings have subjective experience, why physical processes give rise to mental events, why there is “something it is like” to be a conscious being. My first encounter with it left me confused; I struggled to grasp what the question was asking. Consciousness has always been a mystery I’ve grappled with philosophically, though not necessarily in the most scientifically grounded way. I didn’t look to neuroscience or psychology for answers because, while any sound question cannot ignore our scientific insights, my question had yet to be clearly formulated. Philosophy allowed greater freedom to explore what to ask and how to ask it. As I stepped away from the paradigm of monotheistic religion (and soon after, the Cartesian paradigm), the contradictions it held with my scientific education began to dissolve. There was no reason to believe in an eternal soul or any entity inhabiting the physical body, yet my sense of self, my sense of being, and my consciousness remained intact. And I still could not understand exactly what they were.

I explored thought experiments involving death and cloning that challenged my sense of self rather than what I later came to know as phenomenal consciousness. I felt so strongly about myself that it was unsettling and hard to grasp that there was a time when I did not exist and that someday I would no longer exist, or to imagine that in the near future cloning would be possible and another being with all my memories would be as convinced of their identity as I am, while my sense of self would not magically extend to them. Granted, this exaggerated sense of self served some survival purpose, and I was setting myself the inherently impossible task of imagining what it’s like to be unable to imagine. But questions remained, most importantly, what consciousness itself was and how it comes to be.

At the time, I was still unaware of the paradigm that distinguishes phenomenal consciousness—subjective felt experience, what the “hard problem” is about—from reflective consciousness and self-awareness. My intellectual background was largely shaped by philosophers like Nietzsche and Pascal, and later by complex systems theory, so I had formed the idea that consciousness is a fragile emergent property of complex living systems. I had the framework, and still needed to work out the details. This idea lingered in the back of my mind until the hard problem of consciousness brought it back to the forefront. Each time I encountered it, I left confused but increasingly interested in the proposed answers. I could not understand what the question was. Why are we conscious? Why is there any subjective experience at all, rather than nothing—just biological processes running in the dark? From my perspective, the question didn’t make any sense at all; I would be curious about what consciousness is and how it emerges, and would want to challenge the framework and formulate a better definition. But these questions suggested that subjective experience posed a problem, that it didn’t make sense on some level, that it contradicted something else we know, or that maybe it was just unnecessary. There didn’t seem to be a clear alternative beyond suggesting, with no way to prove it, that all these biological processes could run in the dark and produce the same results. The question seemed to stem from a materialist discomfort with being unable to locate or observe consciousness or subjective experience through neuroscience. Then again, I might just be missing something that would help me understand this.

I decided to conduct research and reflect on this while writing short essays and book reviews. With a list of scientists and philosophers in mind—from Nagel and Chalmers to Dennett, Damasio, and Merleau-Ponty, among others—I want to establish the necessary definitions (consciousness, sentience, self-awareness, feeling, wakefulness, qualia, phenomenal experience); answer questions about what we know regarding the brain, the nervous system, and the body in general that are directly relevant to consciousness; explore the origins of the “hard problem” and the attempts to solve it, and possibly dismantle my initial intuition that the hard problem of consciousness might be a poorly framed question; and, most importantly, elaborate on the details of my own framework through a deeper understanding of emergence in complex systems and the limits and boundaries of consciousness and living systems.

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