15.2 — Consciousness: The Hard Problem, Honestly

Here is the problem, stated as plainly as it can be.

There is something it is like to be you.

Red looks like something. Pain feels like something. A cello sounds like something.

And nothing in the physical description of your brain explains why.

The easy and the hard problems

The distinction was named by David Chalmers in 1995 and it is the right one.

The easy problems: how the brain discriminates stimuli, integrates information, reports on its own states, focuses attention, controls behaviour, and distinguishes waking from sleep.

These are called easy not because they are simple — they are enormously difficult and will take another century — but because we know what an answer would look like. You specify a mechanism, and the problem is solved.

The hard problem: why is any of that accompanied by experience?

A system could, in principle, do all of the processing — discriminate red, report "that is red," behave appropriately — with nothing it is like to be it.

And it is not.

Why?

Why it is not a normal scientific problem

Because of what an explanation would have to do.

Every other successful explanation in science reduces a phenomenon to a mechanism. Heat is molecular motion. Life is chemistry. Lightning is electrical discharge.

And in each case, once you have the mechanism, the phenomenon is accounted for — there is no residue.

Here there is a residue. Specify every neuron, every connection, every chemical gradient, and the question "and why is there something it is like?" is still standing.

Which is either a sign that we do not yet have the right concepts, or a sign that this is a different kind of problem.

The positions

Five, and each has a cost.

Physicalism

Experience is a physical process, and the appearance of a residue is a confusion about concepts.

The strongest evidence is the dependence: every alteration to the brain alters experience, precisely. Anaesthesia removes it reversibly. Damage removes specific parts of it. Chemistry shifts it. Nothing has ever been observed to happen to a mind without something happening to a brain.

The cost: it has not explained the residue, and the standard reply — that once the easy problems are solved the hard one will dissolve — is a promissory note that has been outstanding for thirty years.

Illusionism

The stronger version: there is no hard problem, because the phenomenal properties we think we have are not real. The brain represents itself as having them, and the representation is inaccurate.

The cost: it is very difficult to state without seeming to deny the most certain thing anybody has. Descartes' point (10.8) applies: whatever else is doubtful, the experiencing is not.

Dualism

Mind and matter are distinct. Descartes' position (10.8), and Samkhya's (9.4).

The cost is the interaction problem, and it was raised immediately by Princess Elisabeth and has never been answered. If mind has no physical properties, what does it push?

Panpsychism

Experience is a fundamental feature of matter, present in some minimal form everywhere, and complex experience is built from simple experience.

Currently taken seriously by a number of philosophers, which surprises people. Its attraction: it does not have to explain how experience arises from non-experience, because it never does.

The cost is the combination problem: how do many tiny experiences combine into one unified experience? Nobody has an account, and it may be as hard as the original problem.

And idealism

Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derivative.

Which is Advaita's position (9.8), and the Upanishads' (9.2): prajnanam brahma, consciousness is the ultimate reality.

The cost: it has to explain why the physical world behaves so lawfully and so independently of anybody's mind, and it has to account for the extremely tight correlation between brain states and experience.

Where the traditions might actually have something

And this is the chapter's real point, and it should be stated carefully because it is easily overclaimed.

The contemplative traditions have done something science has not: two and a half thousand years of systematic, trained, first-person investigation of the structure of experience.

And they produced findings, in detail.

That the sense of a unified self is constructed rather than given (6.7, 9.4). That awareness can be distinguished from its contents (5.5, 9.2). That attention is trainable and its mechanics are describable (6.9, 9.5). That experience decomposes into components — the raw feeling-tone before the reaction, in 6.8, is a specific and checkable claim.

And several of these have been independently reached from the outside.

The constructed self is broadly what cognitive science now says. The feeling-tone-before-reaction claim is consistent with what is known about affective processing being faster than deliberation. The trainability of attention is measurable.

Which means: on the easy problems, and on the structure of experience, the traditions have data and some of it has held up.

On the hard problem, they have a position rather than a finding. "Consciousness is fundamental" is an answer and it is not established, and the traditions that hold it disagree with each other about what follows (9.4 against 9.8, and 6.7 against both).

What is honestly known

Assemble it.

Consciousness depends on the brain in extraordinary detail. This is not in doubt and any position has to accommodate it.

Specific correlates have been found. Certain patterns of activity accompany conscious perception and are absent when the same stimulus is processed unconsciously.

Several theories exist — integrated information, global workspace, higher-order representation, predictive processing — and each explains some of the data and none has won.

And no theory has an account of why there is experience.

Nobody has closed the gap and nobody has shown the gap is illusory.

What follows practically

Three things, because this is not only an academic question.

Nobody is entitled to certainty here. A confident materialist and a confident idealist are both overreaching, and 15.1's rule applies to both.

The practical content of the traditions does not depend on the answer. 5.5's gap between the observer and the observed is available whether it is a metaphysical fact or a trick of attention, and it works either way.

And the openness of this question is why 14.1's door is not fully closed. We do not have a complete account of what consciousness is, which limits how confident anybody can be about what happens to it.

That is not an argument for survival. It is an argument against certainty, in a domain where certainty is offered constantly from both directions.

What to carry from this page

Every physical fact about your brain could be known and the question "why is there something it is like?" would still be standing.

Five positions, five costs, no winner. And the promissory note that the hard problem will dissolve has been outstanding for thirty years.

The traditions have real data on the structure of experience and a position rather than a finding on why there is any.

And nobody is entitled to certainty here. Which is worth remembering the next time somebody tells you confidently what you are.

Next: 15.3 — the wonder this volume was asked about directly: nothing is truly still, and where the energy comes from.