This blog is named after philosophical zombies, which have been popularised by the philosopher David Chalmers, in order to illustrate “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”.
Anyone hearing this pithy expression for the first time might think the key message of the Hard Problem is that subjective consciousness is very difficult to explain. Which it is. But the Hard Problem is not the challenge of explaining subjective consciousness; nor is it the uncontroversial observation that such an explanation is difficult. It is not even a synonym for the apparent resistance of qualia to derivation — for the so-called Explanatory Gap, though it is often used that way.
The Hard Problem is the challenge of explaining what Chalmers calls “experience”.
“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information‑processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience.”
(Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness, Chalmers, 1995. Emphasis added.)
But what’s the Explanatory Gap, then?
Confusingly, the Gap is also related to the challenge of explaining something called “experience”.
“There is an explanatory gap (a term due to Levine, 1983) between the functions and experience, and we need an explanatory bridge to cross it. A mere account of the functions stays on one side of the gap, so the materials for the bridge must be found elsewhere.” (Chalmers, 1995)
The Gap has not been precisely defined, but it can be thought of as the barrier we meet when we attempt an analytical derivation of qualia and fail (a very narrow reading), or as the subsequent sense of mystification arising from the initial explanatory failure (a broader reaction ).
For more details of different possible reactions to the Gap, see this previous post: The Spectrum.
What the Hard Problem adds to the Gap is a set of problematic (and problemogenic) assumptions about why we meet this barrier. These assumptions fundamentally change the nature of the explanatory target, so that we will need to identify different conceptual sub-species of “experience” to distinguish between the Hard Problem and the Gap. (I’ll name two major subspecies of experience in this post, but ultimately we’ll need several new terms.)
Another way of making the same point would be to note that there is a strong version of the Hard Problem, which is about some special extra thing that gives rise to the Gap, and this is the same special thing that goes missing in zombies… But there is also a weaker version of the Hard Problem that concedes that the Gap might arise within ordinary physical brains, and in this view experience is whatever aspect of reality we find on introspection, or seem to, and then have trouble reconciling with a view of reality s fundamentally physical.
Most people, I imagine, are willing to treat the Hard Problem as a legitimate problem because they see it is as the challenge of explaining “subjective consciousness”, and they see “experience” as just another name for that explanatory target. Unfortunately, as will be discussed int he posts ahead, there are multiple different readings of “experience” and “subjective consciousness”. The Hard Problem leans on this ambiguity, borrowing plausibility from less radical versions of our natural curiosity about consciousness.
I want to debunk the Hard Problem, but I can’t possibly debunk people’s right to feel puzzled. By attaching his philosophical framing to a puzzle, rather than a solution, Chalmers has anchored some tenuous ideas to the undeniable fact that consciousness is confusing.
In this post and the next, I will be arguing that Chalmersian experience, as targeted by the Hard Problem, is a very specific theoretical creature with built-in commitments to the possibility of zombies. Chalmers has been motivated by the subjective consciousness he finds on introspection, but he ultimately targets a messy, incoherent hybrid notion instead. The source of his puzzlement and the proposed target are not the same.
A key component of Chalmersian experience is that it is imagined to be functionless; this is not something that is necessarily true of subjective consciousness, conceived in a theoretically neutral sense. If the issue is approached without Chalmers’ particular conceptual framework, we still have the puzzle of consciousness, but we don’t have the Hard Problem as he has promoted it. This distinction is important, because defending the notion of experience as a non-functional extra is ultimately difficult or impossible, and Chalmers’ framework inevitably leads to a dead-end. But we experience things, and many aspects of that experience are indeed puzzling.
The Hard Problem is a descendant of the Mind-Body Problem (MBP), which was the general challenge of understanding the mind-brain relationship, but the Hard Problem zooms in on the subjective, phenomenal, experiential aspects of mentality.
Why are the easy problems easy, and why is the hard problem hard? The easy problems are easy precisely because they concern the explanation of cognitive abilities and functions. To explain a cognitive function, we need only specify a mechanism that can perform the function. The methods of cognitive science are well-suited for this sort of explanation, and so are well-suited to the easy problems of consciousness. By contrast, the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions. The problem persists even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained. (Chalmers, 1995).
In many quarters, Chalmers’ focus on experience was received as a helpful reframing of the issues. In retrospect, the MBP was an overly broad puzzle that involved a muddled mix of different challenges, many of which would not now be considered as primarily philosophical in nature. The cognitive aspects of the mind are well on their way to being understood in terms of the underlying brain processes, or we can at least see that mechanistic explanations are possible in principle. There is no fundamental mystery involved when we propose that the brain is capable of reasoning, language, sensory processing, planning, or other overtly functional cognitive skills, because all of these capabilities have observable behavioural analogues. We can already reproduce many of these skills in machines, which suggests that we are broadly on the right track in our quest for understanding. These tractable aspects of the MBP primarily fall within the domain of science, not philosophy — they are surrounded by important philosophical issues, but the explanatory task for each of these aspects of mentality can be couched in objective, functional terms.
This is not so, it seems, with “experience”.
It was appropriate, then, for Chalmers to zoom in on the trickier notion of subjectivity as the key source of ongoing philosophical intrigue.
Unfortunately, the zooming-in process ended up crystalising several faulty assumptions, such that the appropriate exclusion of overtly functional issues from the philosophical puzzle of consciousness ended up shutting out science from the core explanatory project of understanding consciousness. (And I here I should add that all you will get in this post is my opinion; the supporting argument will have to be submitted as an IOU to be cashed out later.)
The Hard Problem as laid out by Chalmers involves a specific approach to subjectivity that leads to a conceptual impasse and then stops, unable to proceed, because all functional explanations have been rendered irrelevant. As Chalmers says, “the hard problem is hard precisely because it is not a problem about the performance of functions”. The Hard Problem is essentially a declaration that the phenomenal aspects of consciousness constitute an impenetrable mystery — but I will be arguing that its own framing is to blame, because the Hard Problem, at its puzzled centre, is ill-posed.
But the situation is even worse than that.
Ambiguities in the framing of Chalmers’ Hard Problem mean that the question he has made famous is not even consistently ill-posed; it is a confusing blend of legitimate concerns and conceptual errors, put together with persuasive eloquence in a way that has eclipsed potentially clearer approaches to the issues.
Unfortunately, I can’t offer a definitive proof of this claim. I might not even be able to gain a single convert. Different interpretations can be applied to the same set of empirical observations. The key points of contention involve unfalsifiable beliefs about entities that, by definition, lie beyond our scientific reach. These are difficult matters to think about, opinions on the validity of Chalmers’ framing vary, the available language is vague, and there is no knockdown argument on either side.
(Pointing out that belief in zombies is necessarily deluded comes close to being a decisive argument, if you sit with this realisation for long enough to consider all of its implications. The arguments for the necessary delusion of zombies are found elsewhere in this blog — links below.)
So, I don’t expect to change many minds. I can merely offer an alternative way of viewing the issues that, for me, greatly reduces the sense of mystery — albeit without closing the Explanatory Gap.
The conceptual framing surrounding the Hard Problem is what I will call hardism.
At the time of writing, this is not a recognised philosophical position — but I hope to change that.
Hardism consists of a popular and deeply influential network of philosophical beliefs that ultimately render consciousness baffling. Its key feature, of course, is the Hard Problem, which is centred on a functionless conception of “experience”, and hence on the possibility of zombies.
“Experience”, when used by Chalmers in this context, has the same basic meaning as the term proposed by the philosopher Ned Block, “phenomenal consciousness”, which I briefly explored in a previous post, Your Twin, and take on more substantially in later posts. (Unfortunately, Block does not isolate a clear meaning for this term.)
As used by hardists, “phenomenal consciousness” is supposed to refer to the subjective aspects of consciousness — to the phenomena found on introspection, and often imagined as absent in zombies. Chalmers’ landmark paper used the term “experience” in laying out the issues, so I will continue that usage in this post, but the same discussion could be conducted with the term “phenomenal consciousness”, instead. Block’s term is subject to all of the ambiguities and conflations that affect Chalmer’s term, plus some additional ones, so I will try to dissect it in a future post (see On a Confusion about Phenomenal Consciosuness and the follow-up posts).
Many hardists would also be content to equate “experience” with “qualia”, in part because qualia constitute the most vivid aspect of the puzzle. I think this would be a mistake, because consciousness-the-container and qualia pose distinct challenges, requiring different resolutions. For now, the distinction is not important; the Hard Problem itself does not draw a clear line between qualia and consciousness itself, and both of these aspects of our subjective interiors are subject to all of the issues flagged below.
We could also do a global search-and-replace, substituting the term “experience” with “what-it’s-likeness”, “a subjective aspect” or “a first-person perspective”. These terms might bias our expectations in one direction or another, but the issues would be essentially unchanged — because these, too, can be envisaged as what is imagined as missing in a zombie.
Importantly, “experience” is not defined in Chalmers’ landmark paper, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, much as “phenomenal consciousness” was not defined in Block’s landmark paper. Instead, Chalmers does what most people do in this field: he invites us to consider vivid examples.
“It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information‑processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?” (Chalmers, 1995. Emphasis added.)
In one sense, this approach is understandable: we can point at our own private examples, so we know what Chalmers means. I am picturing a very specific shade of blue, so I don’t need a definition to know that it constitutes a Hard Problem for science. Our curiosity about these matters starts with introspective pointing, and if we can’t get to a sensible definition from that initial recognition of our explanatory target, that definitional difficulty is a key part of what we need to explain.
If it weren’t for the focus on “experience”, this formulation of the Problem might be mistaken for neutral curiosity about the nature of consciousness. Chalmers just wants to explain what we all want explained.
Experience is simply what it is like to be conscious, an idea that encompasses the specific flavours we find on introspection, as well as the mere fact that it is like anything at all. Those aspects are not there in the objective account of the brain, according to Chalmers, so experience is the extra bit that objective accounts left out.
It seems like a coherent puzzle — difficult to answer, but vivid and well-motivated.
But experience is undefined. We still don’t have a clear statement of the Problem, and we have already accepted a couple of unfortunate assumptions, including the idea that there can be something that is fundamentally “beyond the performance of functions”, in the strong sense that it could go missing in a zombie.
The excerpts quoted above are only part of the landmark paper that launched “the Hard Problem” into orbit; they only obliquely refer to the framing that makes the Hard Problem intractable. That framing has zombies at its core, because “experience”, in Chalmers’ hands, is not just something picked out on introspection; it is implicitly equated with what zombies lack.
His landmark paper avoids the Z-word, but the Hard Problem is intimately related to the idea that we could, conceivably, have ended up as a bunch of neurons firing silently in the dark, missing our qualia, and missing our internal awareness.
So why didn’t we?
The central claim of hardism is that there can be no possible functional answer to this question, because what we want explained is equivalent to the human‑zombie difference. Any attempted functional explanation of consciousness would apply equally well to zombies, who are our functional mimics, but they lack what we want explained, so no functional explanation can possibly account for the phenomenal aspects of consciousness: deep blue, middle C, and so on. There will be aspects of consciousness that we explain adequately and share with zombies, and there will be aspects we can’t explain at all — the ones that distinguish us from zombies. Ergo, concludes the hardist, no functional account of subjective consciousness can possibly succeed; it will inevitably leave out the very aspects of mentality we are most interested in, all those phenomena gathered under the label “experience”.
Somehow, we will need a breakthrough theory that incorporates non-functional elements of reality, which science (as it is currently understood) is hopelessly ill-equipped to do.
Hardism can be broadly defined as acceptance of this pessimistic conclusion.
Its scope also includes formulations of the central claim that leave out explicit reference to zombies and instead treat our default model of physical reality as implicitly zombified. Hardists typically start from the assumption that the mere movement of atoms within physical brains cannot possibly entail how experience feels from the inside, so the zombie reference is unnecessary; a zombified perspective of reality is what science itself describes. This implicit acceptance of science as innately zombified is initially plausible, so it is easily overlooked, but it leads to confusion later on. Zombies have snuck in when we weren’t looking.
It is difficult to define hardism more precisely than this, partly because it includes a rough coalition of different beliefs, and partly — I will argue — because it is ultimately centred on an explanatory target that is irretrievably vague and deeply incoherent.
The vagueness is a recognised part of the puzzle, cheerfully conceded by hardists; the incoherence is something I will have to prove.
But they are closely related.
Chalmers’ “experience” is picked out by internal pointing, without any explicit subjective awareness of any functional defining features. The targeted entity is then conceptualised as some thing or some property that completely defies functional characterisation, which means that it necessarily defies definition, as well.
Without a functional definition of what it is that needs to be explained, it is not possible to give an entirely clear account of what a hardist believes, not even from within the hardist framing — and that’s part of what makes the Problem so Hard. We can’t be wrong about how things seem to us, says the hardist, and yet how things seem to us sits outside the reach of science, resisting definition.
If I complain that there is intractable vagueness built in to this framing, it merely proves Chalmers’ point.
It is sometimes supposed that identifying any incoherence within this vague intuition must be impossible. How can we refute an entity that does nothing in the physical world, cannot be detected and has not even been defined? The combination of vagueness, defying the explanatory reach of science, and having no identifiable physical effects make for a heady mix that is difficult to think about.
In outline, though, the central concerns of hardism are clear enough, despite the vagueness.
Hardism essentially consists of accepting the legitimacy of the Hard Problem, which means:
1) noting that physics seems causally complete, leaving consciousness and qualia as functionally superfluous;
2) rejecting the possibility of any satisfying functional account of consciousness and qualia; and
3) blaming both of these features on the mysterious functionless nature of “experience”.
“Experience”, in this view, is conceptualised as an entity or a set of properties that we apprehend directly and accurately during introspection from a subjective perspective, but cannot subsequently find with the objective tools of science.
Importantly, Chalmers’ proposed reason for not finding experience objectively is that experience is not logically entailed by the functional relationships of any of the objective physical entities involved in cognition. (He expresses this by saying that the phenomenal facts are not “supervenient” on the physical facts, where supervenience essentially amounts to rigid logical entailment.)
In full-strength hardism, it is not just our scientific account that leaves out experience; the hardist holds that experience is missing in the physical world described by that account — a subtle but important difference. (If this difference is not clear, note that an account of a black hole exerts no gravitational pull; the gravity is missing. But gravity is not missing in the entity being described. Accounts are not like the things they are accounts of.)
Experience must be in the world, reasons the hardist, because we can point at it, but it is not part of the objective world described by science, so the world in toto must contain the extras that were not described.
In other words, Chalmers’ experience is intrinsically subjective. It directly embodies the mysterious aspects of consciousness in a private subjective realm that minds can see but science cannot. It is an epiphenomenon, a side effect that can be notionally removed while leaving all of the brain’s functions intact.
Based on my previous posts, you might expect that I want to take a Two-Brain Approach to these three elements of hardism.
We need to ask the question: Where is each issue located?
So let’s try again.
Hardism essentially consists of accepting the legitimacy of the Hard Problem, which means:
1) noting that physics appears causally complete, leaving consciousness and qualia as apparently functionally superfluous when contemplated by the Scientist; and
2) rejecting the possibility that the Scientist’s Brain could ever entertain any satisfying reductive account of consciousness and qualia;
3) blaming both of these features on the mysterious functionless nature of “experience” in the Subject.
To combat hardism, then, an anti-hardist needs to address the same three issues without the special epiphenomenal extra. That means explaining:
the pseudo-epiphenomenality of experience (working out why the functions of qualia and consciousness are hard to see, easy to ignore, and not apparently needed to achieve causal closure of the physical world);
the pseudo-irreducibility of experience (working out why the cognitive journey of deriving qualia meets barriers); and
the incoherence of the central hardist notion of experience, conceptualised as a non-functional extra.
This is a manageable project, which will be tackled in the posts ahead, but for now I want to focus on the hardist notion of experience, which sits at the puzzled centre of hardist concerns.
There is general acceptance that the hardist target suffers from vagueness; now we can begin to make the case that it is incoherent.
Experience, recall, is not just what gives rise to an Explanatory Gap; it’s what zombies lack.
Say it after me: “Experience is what zombie’s lack.”
We could abbreviate this conception of experience as the HZD: the Human-Zombie Difference.
“Experience is the HZD.”
Still with me? Are you okay with that conception of experience?
Because I am not okay with it. In fact, I’m pretty f**n’ far from okay. If we accept this implicit definition, the prospect of a coherent account of consciousness has already been lost.
Earlier, we said that experience was something we picked out by introspection, but since then we’ve engaged in conceptual drift, landing in paradox.
Let’s back up to a more secure point in the discussion. We only know about any of this entire puzzle through our concepts, and all of us are merely guessing at the reality behind those concepts, getting different answers. We need to keep track of where those concepts come from.
The underlying hardist concept of experience is based on what zombies are imagined as lacking, not on what zombies lack.
Again, this is a subtle but important distinction. At this stage, we don’t even agree that zombies are possible.
There is no functional definition available for experience — as already noted, experience is initially picked out by introspective pointing — so employing the concept of, say, blueness, when we are not directly engaged in a perception always entails an imaginative act, an appeal to memory, or some creative process that could pass as either.
The hardist version of experience also requires that we imagine experience in terms of a human-zombie difference.
This is problematic in several ways. For a start, the hardist concept of experience as an HZD contains the assumption that zombies are possible (or that physical reality can be thought of as zombified by default). There are good reasons to doubt this, and even better reasons to keep this contentious assumption out of the language used to discuss the issues. If “experience” is conceptualised as an HZD, such that we end up invoking zombies whenever we use the word, the central argument has already been conceded before we’ve even started. If zombies are possible, a physical account of reality is incomplete; we shoudl not be conceding this every time we use the word “experience”.
Furthermore, if the target concept rests on our ability to imagine zombies, that means our concept of experience needs to have content: we can’t work with entirely empty concepts, or we would not have any sense of the special human extra standing in need of explanation. We must think of the human versions of blueness, middle-C, awareness, and so on, in order to contrast that with the featureless void imagined in zombies. Our brains must engage with something, which must have physical effects in the mechanisms that let us know we have successfully engaged.
That means the hardists’ concept of experience is actually based on what zombies are imagined as lacking, (WZAIAL), but the Hard Problem targets the human-zombie difference (the HZD). The Hard Problem is inspired by one thing but targets another.
We’ll need better names for these. The first can be pronounced “Wha-zy-al”, rhyming with “denial”; the second will depend on which brand of English you speak.
I propose that we use terms that are independent of zombies: “phenomenal spice” for the HZD and “ostensional consciousness” for WZAIAL. The logic is simple enough. “Spice” is something that adds flavour without substance. “Ostensional” just means “related to pointing”. (The word has been put on hold for the last 4 centuries, but it is time it made a comeback.)
Ostensional consciousness, or the ostensional element for any quale, is simply what we pick out through introspective pointing. And, sure, it’s difficult to think about that target in functional terms, but there is no need to accept the hardist hypothesis that it is totally without effects in the physical world. That seems highly unlikely.
After all, I’m typing about the quale for blueness right now.
Not seeing how some quale fits into the causal chain (a problem in the Scientist’s brain) is not the same as it being truly epiphenomenal (an enigma in the Subject’s brain).
If these two concepts, HZD (spice) and what zombies are imagined as lacking (ostensional consciousness) are running together in your own head, consider the content of two of my previous posts:
Your Twin, in which I imagine zombies over the course of about 4K words.
The Evidence for Epiphenomenalism, my shortest post ever, based on all the content that can be reliably sourced to the HZD.
The first post was motivated by ostensional consciousness (o.c.), and it describes the conceptual content of o.c., even though it is notionally about the human-zombie difference (because I didn’t draw the distinction, then, that I am trying to draw now). The second post gets its content directly from the HZD (and, as you might know by now, it is empty).
The concept with content (ostensional consciousness) depends on actual cognitive activity in the notional Scientist’s Brain; the associated post required cognitive activity on my part to write, and on your part to read. We both picked out various phenomena as we created a conception of a human and contrasted that to a zombie, and the process of picking out those phenomena changed the course of our cognition.
The presumed explanatory target (the HZD) is imagined as existing in the Subject’s Brain, but we always fall back on ostensional consciousness to complete the imaginative task.
We imagine zombies as very different to us, and must have some contentful idea of what they are lacking but, paradoxically we must imagine that the HZD is removable to make a zombie, with no cognitive consequences. We can’t really say anything about the HZD that could have plausibly come from the HZD, because the HZD cannot influence the content or the sequencing of our thoughts.
My zombie twin writes the same posts on these issues, for all the same reasons. Indeed, even if I know that the conflation between the HZD/spice and ostensional consciousness is an issue and try to avoid it, I can’t write any post that differs in any way from the post my zombie twin would write; I can’t even use pictures to illustrate any of my points without my twin choosing the same pictures.
And here we see the beginnings of a serious conceptual issue with the hardists’ explanatory target. Chalmersian “experience” is actually an unacknowledged hybrid of ostensional consciousness, which is picked out by private introspection and has content worth writing about, and the HZD or spice, which stands outside cognition — and about which we could know nothing if it truly behaved as advertised.
Even if we accept the logical possibility of zombies, whatever actually distinguishes us from them can’t plausibly contribute any informational content to our concept of a human-zombie difference — not without immediately violating the idea that our proposed special extra has no physical effects on our cognitive machinery. Any content within our concept of a human-zombie difference must have got there via functional means that we share with zombies, and so it is illegitimate content.
If we take our concept of experience and dutifully subtract content that has come from disallowed, functional, cognitive sources, we should end up with an empty concept. If the hardists are right, there might be something left over in reality, some non-physical thing out there somewhere beyond functional analysis, but there shouldn’t be any informational content about it left in our heads, filed under the heading “What zombie’s lack”, about which we can have any confidence at all. The leftover experiential element can’t play any role in any chain of reasoning we can know about.
The HZD folder in our heads can only be empty or contradictory.
We aren’t puzzled by an empty concept, so, if we are puzzled — and most of us are — we must be keeping content within our concept of “experience” that has a functional basis after all.
We can’t ever square off ostensionall consciousness with the HZD, but we need both elements within the hardist hybrid notion of experience, if experience is to serve as the target of the Hard Problem. “Experience” must satisfy the twin requirements of being worth talking about and leaving our cognition completely unaffected.
Within the hardist mind, I propose, these contradictory requirements are met by different conceptual entities. The hardist is constantly equivocating between them, and once the equivocation has been seen, it is dizzying to watch.
The central hardist concept of experience, then, is a hybrid concept and it is innately incoherent.
The first and greatest sin of hardism, I will argue, is the conflation of ostensional consciousness with phenomenal spice.
Don’t worry if this does not yet seem plausible. These are subtle objections about ill-defined concepts that are famously difficult to think about, and the hybrid nature of Chalmersian “experience” will take much more time to demonstrate.
Beyond adherence to the problematic notion of non-functional experience, hardists are not a unified group; they offer a wide range of solutions to the puzzle of consciousness. Many of them are critical of the solutions offered by their fellow hardists, and they are as interested in what divides them as what unites them. They can nonetheless be recognised as having common concerns because of their shared dissatisfaction with conventional neuroscience, their conviction that functional approaches to consciousness are doomed, and their willingness to engage with fringe theories.
Some strong hardists, such as Chalmers, are convinced that science is completely lost; they argue that consciousness must occupy a fundamental position in the nature of reality, on a par with other inexplicable, fundamental elements, such as mass, charge and spacetime. (These were Chalmers’ original examples; he might express things differently now, because there has been recent discussion of the idea that spacetime is emergent, not fundamental.)
Other strong hardists, known as idealists, even argue that consciousness is more primary than physical reality itself. Others, known as panpsychists, imagine that each part of physical reality has a built-in readiness to produce experiential properties, so the miracle of consciousness is not concentrated in biological brains but infuses all of reality in primitive forms that somehow coalesce to produce the marked individual consciousnesses that we find on introspection.
Other hardists imagine, much less extravagantly, that consciousness emerges from physical reality by some inscrutable process, and everything will be made clear when neuroscience makes some as yet unimaginable breakthrough. Some of these optimists could be considered latent hardists: they express confidence in conventional science (and might even scoff at the supposed intractability of the Hard Problem) while nonetheless thinking about consciousness in such a way that they will never be satisfied with any actual scientific account of consciousness. Some of them envisage a version of “experience” that is not substantially different to Chalmers’ mysterious functionless extra, but they nonetheless trust that it emerges from physical neurons as some bizarre side effect that will seem less strange when we finally achieve understanding. The critical breakthrough is always envisaged to lie around the corner in some dimly seen future, where the paradoxes of hardism are imagined as being resolved, but these latent hardists maintain this hope without actually surrendering any of the problematic intuitions that make the Hard Problem unsolvable.
These views sometimes synergise with a fascination for the unsolved mysteries of quantum physics. Some physicists have proposed a role for consciousness in collapsing the quantum wave function, suggesting that it is the mind that creates a coherent reality from the indeterminate quantum haze; this potentially puts mind in the basement of physics where it can be rediscovered by the brain. Such ideas are speculative and lack empirical support, but they gain plausibility from the hardist intuition that consciousness has already broken all the rules of conventional science.
Despite not identifying itself as a distinct school of philosophical thought, hardism is important to recognise, because all hardist positions start from a similar conceptual framing.
Hardism seems to leave the standard scientific view of reality in need of a radical revision or, at least, a transformative breakthrough – so it tends to encourage fringe beliefs. In its strongest forms, it encourages wild speculation about the nature of reality.
But hardism dominates the mainstream as well. The Hard Problem lurks behind all discussions in this field, spilling over from philosophy into cognitive neuroscience, such that, in many quarters, hardist assumptions have acquired the weight of dogma and the hardist framework now provides the default way of viewing the puzzle of consciousness.
Sorting out the flaws in hardism is not just important to resist the pull to fringe theories. The same sources of confusion that inspire the hardist framing can also interfere with standard physicalist neuroscience, even among those who would prefer to reject hardism. The same intuitions that make the non-derivability of qualia seem puzzling to hardists can drive determined researchers to attempt the impossible, or to reject otherwise good theories on specious hardist grounds.
For instance, a visual scientist sympathetic to physicalism might try to derive redness from circuit diagrams, not understanding why this is a doomed exercise. They might set off on a neuroscience career full of ambition and optimism, but never make the progress they expected, always rejecting their own theories because their account of colour vision doesn’t lead them to an elusive concept of redness; the circuits can always be imagined in grey. Maybe they just haven’t found the bridging principle yet? Decades later, they are as frustrated as pre-release Mary, and increasingly tempted to depart mainstream neuroscience for the fringes.
Or a cognitive scientist might reject an otherwise promising theory of consciousness, because it seems as though the entire theory could be envisaged in zombified terms. The dissatisfied cognitive scientist might be personally dismissive of the Hard Problem, but, if latent hardist intuitions are given free reign, the candidate theory is likely to be dismissed as merely functional — as not accounting for “experience”. because the phenomenal aspect seems to be missing. If the theory can be imagined without phenomenal consciousness, they reason, it can’t be an adequate explanation of phenomenal consciousness. Maybe they just need to keep looking?
Such scientists are not hardists in their overall sentiment, but they have unwittingly accepted the background hardist assumption that a gap in explanation must imply a schism in reality, so, wanting to believe in physicalism, they search in vain for a theory that is actually ruled out by their own cognitive topology. (Future posts will explore the cognitive basis of the Gap, but see, for now, the earlier post on Rhonda the Retinal Researcher.)
Hardist intuitions have even come to dominate the available language. Many features of the puzzle have been inappropriately grouped under broad umbrella terms; this is particularly problematic for the different species of “experience” that have been inappropriately thrown into a messy hybrid, such as ostensional consciousness (WZAIAL) and phenomenal spice (the HZD). “Qualia” and “consciousness-the-container” are also often treated as interchangeable, if they are distinguished at all, making it harder to understand both.
Other important aspects of the puzzle have been given their own names, like “access consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness” (Block, 1995), but these terms have been interpreted through Chalmers’ framing, taking on hardist assumptions, and making it harder to consider that these two versions of consciousness might just be different views of the same processes.
This is a problem because there is good evidence that language can drive our conceptual habits. It can be hard to see the border between concepts that share a common name or to see the commonality between targets that have been linguistically separated.
That means, to develop the case for anti-hardism, as I mean to do in the posts ahead, I will need to invent new terms merely to question the prevailing assumptions.
Despite my rejection of the Hard Problem, I think the success of the hardist framing is not surprising. Chalmers’ central thesis – that we cannot account for consciousness in functional terms – is superficially plausible and intellectually seductive. It is supported by strong intuitions that have been put together in the form of clever arguments, the flaws of which are often difficult to see. There is even an important grain of truth underlying the hardist position: we do indeed face a Gap, of sorts.
Before choosing among the radical solutions on offer, though, it is important to reconsider whether science is as broken as the hardists suggest.
I don’t think it is.
In fact, I think we can already identify half a dozen serious conceptual flaws in hardism and, once we bring these into the light, the puzzle of consciousness loses much of its mysterious aura.
In this view, I am not alone.
Hardism is clearly widespread and deeply influential, but its prevalence is difficult to quantify.
In a 2020 Philosophical Papers survey, professional philosophers were asked whether they thought there was a Hard Problem. Some respondents (about 2%) noted that the survey question itself was unclear – and I agree, because it was phrased as follows:
“Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): yes or no?”
Unfortunately, this survey question does not specify what should constitute believing that the Hard Problem exists.
What percentage of evolutionary biologists think creationism is real? Biologists could acknowledge that the cultural phenomenon of creationism as a belief system is real, even if they believe that the content of that belief system is nonsense.
To be useful, the survey question should not be asking if the Hard Problem exists, but whether it is well-founded. It would be silly to deny that the Hard Problem exists as a cultural phenomenon among philosophers and scientists interested in consciousness. It would also be difficult to deny that many intelligent people are puzzled, and they are puzzled about something in the vicinity of their concept of experience, and they recognise Chalmers’ framing as a pithy expression of their puzzlement.
The Hard Problem could simultaneously exist and be ill‑posed.
Also, if we use “the Hard Problem” as a synonym for the Explanatory Gap, a usage that appears to be widespread, this would immediately make “the Hard Problem” real – albeit in a limited sense that falls short of the puzzle posed by Chalmers.
Within these major limitations, though, the survey showed strong support for the existence of the Hard Problem. A majority (62%) of the philosophers said they believed that, yes, the Hard Problem existed (or they leaned towards “yes”), while 30% said no (or they leaned towards “no). About 4% were undecided, and less than 1% answered “There is no fact of the matter”, implying that the Hard Problem is empty or ill-posed.
At any rate, hardism appears to be popular, and it currently appears to have majority support among philosophers – but there is also substantial resistance.
Among those who reject the Hard Problem, reasons for denying its legitimacy vary, but there are some key recurring themes.
Some anti-hardists seem to be of the view that it is simply too soon to decide whether we face a major mystery; neuroscience is just getting started, so worrying about the unexplained aspects of consciousness is premature. Some scientists point out that every chain of scientific questions has to reach ignorance eventually, and so consciousness is no different to any other domain of inquiry. We know what we know and we are baffled by much of the remainder. Sometimes this view is accompanied by what could be called Gap Denialism: the expectation that the Gap will shrink away to nothing with further advances in neuroscience.
As already noted, I think this hope is misplaced, for reasons that will be discussed in the post ahead, and I will argue instead for Gap Compatibilism. (See also my previous post, The Spectrum, which considers the range of opinions on the Gap.) Several philosophers and scientists have argued, as I will, that we can already propose plausible cognitive explanations for the existence of the Explanatory Gap for qualia, which means that we can account for the gap without being able to close it.
Many philosophers object to the central hardist idea of experience as a non-functional extra, noting that Chalmers’ views essentially amount to epiphenomenalism, a largely discredited view that envisages consciousness as a mysterious side effect having no causal influence on the physical world. Unfortunately, objections to hardism on these grounds have to step around the fact that Chalmers himself does not directly own up to being an epiphenomenalist – though his support for the possibility of zombies amounts to the same basic position, and any distance between hardism and epiphenomenalism relies on questionable semantics.
Some anti-hardists have explicitly suggested that the Hard Problem is based on mistaken assumptions that arise from the brain’s distorted view of itself, which will be a major theme of this blog.
For instance, I am personally impressed with Michael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory (AST) as a potential theory of consciousness-the-container. He describes consciousness as a model for managing attention, and in that sense it is entirely consistent with what I have called virtualism. The target of the model has no independent existence, so explaining its creation from neural activity is not necessary. Accordingly, Graziano does not offer AST as a solution to the Hard Problem, but instead suggests that the physical brain “falsely believes in a hard problem.” I think this diagnosis is correct, and that similar mistakes are being made in relation to qualia.
Several other scientists and philosophers have also suggested that the Hard Problem is conceptually misguided, a non‑problem.
“It is the ‘easy’ problem that is hard, while the hard problem just seems hard because it engages ill‑defined intuitions.” (Dehaene, 2014,)
“There is no real distinction between hard and easy problems of consciousness, and the illusion that there is one is caused by the pseudo‑profundity that often accompanies category mistakes.” (Pigliucci, 2013)
There is also this dismissal by the philosopher Thomas Metzinger, in an interview with podcaster Sam Harris:
HARRIS: So you're not a fan of the framing due to David Chalmers of “the hard problem of consciousness”?
METZINGER: No, that's so boring ‑ that's last century. We all respect David, and we know he's very smart and has a very fast mind. There's no debate about that. But conceivability arguments are just very, very weak. If you have an ill‑defined, folk‑psychological umbrella term like “consciousness”, then you can pull off all kinds of scenarios and zombie thought‑experiments. It helped to clarify some issues in the mid‑nineties. But the consciousness community has moved on.
Unlike Metzinger, I don’t find these issues boring, and I don’t think many have moved on… But I agree that it is easy to get confused by launching into zombie thought experiments armed with ill-defined concepts.
The worst of these ill-defined concepts is the hybrid already mentioned, the one that combines ostensional consciousness with phenomenal spice. This conflation, lying at the centre of hardism, ultimately arises from what seemed to be the primary strength of the hardist framing when the Hard Problem was first introduced: the separation of the problems of consciousness into an Easy pile and a Hard pile.
Like Pigliucci and Dehaene, quoted above, I think this separation is conceptually flawed.
Unlike them, I think Chalmers needed two more piles…
To be continued…
I am enjoying these posts tremendously, working through them in order. What a fantastic resource, and one simply made available to us for free!
But I have to ask: are there plans to turn all this into a book? It seems like it would be very easy to do so. And people like me (philosophically trained, but working in a different silo, and without a background in the philosophy of mind) would definitely read it. (Advertising tagline: You've read and fallen in love with Dennett ... NOW CONFRONT THE ZOMBIE'S DELUSION!")
Fascinating. Full disclosure: I haven't read it all. Yet. it will take me some time to digest what I have read (about half.) This:
"The question he has made famous is not even consistently ill-posed; it is a confusing blend of legitimate concerns and conceptual errors, put together with persuasive eloquence in a way that has eclipsed potentially clearer approaches to the issues."
Ah, yes, the confusing tactics of some in academia. I look forward to reading more.