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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