Way back in January 2007, when this blog was just a few years old, I wrote “Digging into the hard problem of consciousness.” In that post I quoted Steven Pinker about what the hard problem consists of. It:
Is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one’s head—why there is first-person, subjective experience….The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place.
Ah… or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. This points to how I’m increasingly looking upon the hard problem. Which I realize will strike most people as either (1) a wise understanding of consciousness, (2) a totally ridiculous and nonsensical notion, or (3) a position on a subject that isn’t at all interesting, so who cares how you look upon the hard problem?
Well, in regard to (3), not many people. But I find this question interesting, so I’ll plug onward with what I, not surprisingly, view as a wise understanding of consciousness.
Which is, simply put: it is what it is.
Meaning, each of us feels like it is something to be us. We have subjective experience of the world as it is known to us by our conscious awareness. And we have a subjective experience of what is like to be us, a direct knowing of pain, joy, fear, delight, and so many other feelings that we can assign words to, yet cannot be captured by words or any other symbols.
Those emotions just are what they are. Just as subjective experience just is what it is.
The hard problem seems to assume, or at least to strongly imply, a dualism that doesn’t match up with reality. The hard problem is how conscious experience arises from physical goings-on in the brain. So it is assumed, or strongly implied, that consciousness must be different from bodily activity, principally brain activity.
Gosh, how could crude matter give rise to ethereal thoughts and emotions? This is so unlikely, figuring out the answer to that question is a really hard problem!
Unless it isn’t a problem at all. Neither a hard problem or an easy problem. Just no problem. After all, it doesn’t make sense to wonder why living beings feel alive, or why we feel heated when we’re hot, or why water feels wet. Or… why consciousness feels like something. In each case, a conscious experience is simply what the experience consists of.
If a living being doesn’t feel alive, it is dead. If we don’t feel heated, we aren’t hot. If water doesn’t feel wet, it is ice or steam. If it doesn’t feel like something to be us, we aren’t having a conscious experience. The only problem here is wrongly believing there is a problem.
Without conscious experience, there is no hard problem. In fact, without conscious experience there is nothing at all. This is the strange loop that I wrote about in my previous post, how the cosmos and us are inextricably intertwined, with the cosmos giving rise to us, and we giving rise to the cosmos by being consciously aware of it.
Likewise, to wonder why there is something it feels like to be us ignores the strange loop where feeling like it is something to be us gives rise to wondering, along with everything else we’re aware of. Sometimes problems are much simpler than they appear to be at first. Or even nonexistent.
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Let your problems die from neglect and if they weren’t really problems they won’t be conscious of it anyway. Cast the die and let the Wizard of Oz sort it out.
@ Brian. “After all, it doesn’t make sense to wonder why living beings feel alive, or why we feel heated when we’re hot, or why water feels wet. Or… why consciousness feels like something. In each case, a conscious experience is simply what the experience consists of.”
The trouble is, one could still say that knowing feeling alive, feeling hot, or water feeling wet is only recognised as such because we are conscious of it. So, the so-called mystery of consciousness, how it arises etc., is still controversial and open to conjecture.
Although strong scientific evidence shows that consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain, there is still the question as to how the brain does that – the ‘hard problem’ still remains.
As for: “Without conscious experience, there is no hard problem. In fact, without conscious experience there is nothing at all.” Yes, if I am not having the conscious experience, there is nothing at all – no hard problem – yet, even if I am not around (unconscious or dead) to be experiencing the hard problem, there are still millions of others around experiencing the hard problem. It still goes on – without ‘me’.
All good fun this. I just had a chat with AI about such things. It ended up more-or-less agreeing with me – so much for AI.
The pattern in this blog’s writings and trajectory points to a recognizable post-exit psychological dynamic common among long-term members of high-commitment guru or mystical groups who later reject the framework. After roughly 35 years inside Radha Soami Satsang Beas, a structured Eastern mystical path with a living guru, daily meditation practice, moral vows, karma doctrine, and a clear path back to God, he experienced the classic rupture.
What rupture? The external authority and promised metaphysical destination lost credibility. This is no small thing after 35 years of belief and practice. The resulting vacuum is not merely intellectual. It is existential. The prior system had supplied a coherent narrative of ultimate meaning and purpose, and a method that felt like progress. RSSB had also supplied him community and identity, and even status as a leader and personal bodyguard to his guru. Above all else, RSSB had secured him an answer to death and non-existence.
Once that collapsed, it necessitated a psychological task of reconstructing a worldview that can still deliver comparable existential security, but without reinstalling a theistic or guru-centered authority. And that search is what virtually all his posts on this forum are about.
In this essay, his repeated emphasis on “it is what it is,” the dissolution of the hard problem of consciousness into a non-problem, and the strange loop between cosmos and awareness are of a piece with his explicit posts about being happy being an atheist after 35 years of RSSB belief. He is trying to make naturalism feel complete and self-sufficient.
Okay, but there is an unspoken tension. The tension of the need to convert a negative, that absence of all that RSSB teaches, into a positive, self-validating stance. That’s been the mission of this blog. No doubt some see it as celebratory and victorious. I see it more as striving, searching, and dissatisfaction. Here’s why:
He has written about intermittent intense fear of non-existence. Leaving a system that promised transcendence of death does not automatically erase that fear. One of his common responses is to elevate consciousness or immediate experience itself into the ultimate ground. For example here, implementing a strategy of being aware or feeling like something becomes the whole story and needs no further justification or transcendent source.
He suggests anti-RSSB is easy, but is it really? Having rejected dogmatic authority, it must be pointed out that in 20 years of detailing his journey from RSSB he has failed to comfortably adopt any new set of unexamined beliefs. RSSB philosophy is certainly an open ground for criticism, and fair play to him for his critiques on those theistic issues. But atheism and naturalism must be shown to be not merely true but genuinely sufficient. They must be capable of underwriting meaning, wonder, and ethical orientation without residual longing for the old framework or the emotional rewards of previous religious life. Hence his effort to reframe classic philosophical puzzles such as the hard problem of consciousness as pseudo-problems that dissolve once one stops looking for something beyond.
Long-term members of such groups as RSSB often internalize the idea that leaving equals spiritual failure or being lost. His blog title Church of the Churchless, the slogan of spiritual independence, and the repeated affirmation that there is no Path, only human conceptualizations of paths, serve to invert the former judgment: the heretic becomes the one who has seen through the illusion. And so, his drive is to make that inversion stable and emotionally satisfying rather than merely defiant.
But given his continued philosophical search for the unholy grail of this imagined independence, it is not clear he is succeeding.
And he is not alone. I share his dilemma, as I too have a retention of a contemplative temperament without the metaphysics of the Sant Mat path to which I once wholeheartedly belonged. Decades of meditation practice, guru fealty, and group identity do not simply vanish for many of us. The philosophical move that treats subjective experience as brute and self-explanatory seems to be an avenue for keeping the felt richness of religious belief while discarding the theistic or dualistic scaffolding that once explained it. But is it anything more than seems?
In short, the underlying obsession is the search for a form of atheism or naturalism that is not merely intellectually defensible but existentially adequate. A philosophy that can replace the lost sense of cosmic orientation and quiet residual fears of meaninglessness or annihilation. The hard-problem dissolution and the it is what it is stance are attempts at full closure to the previous theistic and devotional orientation. It is another attempt to close the gap between this is all there is and this is enough. Whether the closure is fully successful is a separate question; the psychological pressure to achieve it is clear from the long arc of his writing. It is clear to me anyway. But I do not think it is clear to him that, after 20 years, still searching for The Answer, something is amiss that begs to be explored. I’m talking here about not just him, but also me, and I dare say most of us in the ex-guru camp.
To Sant64
An eloquent and very insightful response (after read no.1). Both relevant and resonant, thanks for some great honest input. Applies to most of us. I’ll read again
Happy birthday to a son of a C . I knew his school of thought was anybody can die anytime and hopefully she will soon about his wife. He can’t help it if he’s lucky. Charan Singh of course knew in this very lifetime while he was alive. That I had initiated him in my last life. When Gurinder Singh told me to grow my beard he was sick with cancer. And he told me over and over because I didn’t want to grow a beard. I told him not all Catholics have beards. Paul McCartney told me that Gurinder wished that he could shave he said. Paul asked me if it’s okay that I was elected to be a master and I said quote. No it’s not okay and it will never be okay.
And there’s only two kinds of Masters. Ones that have hope for their students during this very lifetime and us that don’t. But to be a master of the Shabd you have to be a vegetarian just to start with, even to be a student. Most people can’t even do that without making a ton of excuses. I’m easy with my students. I’ll let them walk all over me as long as they wear strong shoes. ( Reference to Abbey Rd album cover)
It’s the old imponderable – again ! It just won’t go away. We’re all on this sinking ship of existence together, even the ones who fervently practise their meditation every day… they do want an insurance policy I have to say, and if part of that (insurance) contract is believing in God and doing everything for God….. But there is an almighty big But here : have they any idea whatsoever as to who or what this God is ? He is not what they imagine him to be. That power which created all this is not so easily fathomed. So what the hell use is there talking about consciousness. It’s unfathomable.
And Sant64 gives a beautiful summary of what’s going on. I hope BrianJi can take it. When he writes a blog saying for those 35 years he didn’t have a clue, and for the following 20 years he still didn’t have a clue, then something has been achieved.
I’m in the same boat (a good 22 years doing at least 2 hours a day etc. and trying to believe in Charan (and Sawan I have to say)).
God bless us all, and may everyone be happy and free from misery.
The hard problem is trying to determine if consciousness is based in the physical body or in something supernatural (using the conservative definition of this term, meaning not yet measured or confirmed by science, unknown from the view of science).
For years mainstream neuroscience has argued that consciousness must be entirely based in the physical body as defined by science today, or some new combination of known elements and structures in the body.
But neuroscience can’t actually confirm a lot of unknowns.
How can the brain process information faster than the fastest supercomputer set up to mimic the brain, when electro chemical signals through the brain? Neurochemical signals at best run 270 mph, but electronic signals run 330 million mph.
Lots of explanations have been offered, but nothing proven yet.
Still, it’s just a matter of time.
When it is proven scientifically, what we call today as supernatural won’t be seen that way. It will be seen as natural and measurable.
What we now call the physical body well have elements attributed to it that today we don’t know about.
And the connection of the body and brain to the quantum fields of energy science has already proven we are all contained within, will also be explored and proven.
Some notions people come up with, over time, are proven real. Some are proven false. And others aren’t proven yet.