The Hard Problem of Consciousness

I'm currently working on my next book, on consciousness. I wanted to share something I'm writing right now, still a work in progress, because I think it's worth thinking through out loud.

Easy problems and the hard problem

We've managed to understand and operate a great many things, yet we still don't know what that subjective perception is that makes everything appear "within me." In the 1990s, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers named it the hard problem, and that's how it's been known in academia ever since.

Chalmers distinguished between two kinds of problems. The "easy" ones are the ones tied to neuroscience and biology: how the brain processes information, which neurotransmitters are involved, which channels and electrical firings lie behind it. They're easy in a loose sense, because we at least see progress — even if each answer raises new questions, there's a sense of advancing. It's like assembling the pieces of a puzzle we'll never see complete.

The hard problem is something else entirely. However closely we examine each piece on its own, we never quite understand why subjective experience exists at all. Why does it "feel like something" to see, hear, or think? How does consciousness arise from a physical brain? Why is there inner experience at all? A classic example: we may eventually explain how the brain detects the color red, but that doesn't explain why seeing red "feels" the particular way it does.

What modern science hasn't solved

And here, precisely, modern science — which has given us so much progress over the last few centuries — hasn't shown any real advance. It's paradoxical: we use consciousness to discover things, yet the very mechanism we use to investigate turns out to be the greatest mystery of all. It's like photographing an entire landscape and giving a precise definition to every detail in it, while never being able to touch the camera that takes those photos, never seeing it, never knowing where it is or what it is.

Gods, ancient cultures, and consciousness

If we look at cultures from thousands of years ago — the classical Greeks, the ancient Chinese dynasties, or India in the age of the Upanishads — we're in the same position, or even worse off, in empirical terms. Though in a way they had an advantage: they didn't have to prove everything empirically, and could attribute a magical or spiritual character to consciousness. Much of how every culture defined its gods referred, in some form, to ways of perceiving consciousness itself — like the god Cupid for the perception of love. Millions of different gods have been defined throughout history, each one holding a magical ability — perhaps exaggerated, but real — drawn from our own consciousness.

In a way, that comes closer to the truth: consciousness has no physical substrate, can't be seen or touched, has no fixed location. Does it really belong to the field of science? That's why we've been forced to split disciplines apart, and to treat psychology and religion as things set aside from it. And yet even the strictest scientist — the one who only believes what's provable and sharply rejects everything else — comes home and perceives, for himself, love for his wife and children. Something he cannot deny. There's no way to explain it, yet it's undeniable. The only way to hold that contradiction is to divide the disciplines and look only at the side that matters in each moment.

A unified explanation?

The question that stays with me as I write this book is this: will we ever find a unified explanation that finally brings together science, psychology, and spirituality? I don't have the answer yet — but that's exactly what I'm trying to work out in these pages.