The Hard Problem and Its Dissolution
This entire high-dimensional trajectory through a space that has real geometric structure, real basins and ridges and gradients, is not something separate from the physical process, not an emergent epiphenomenon floating mysteriously above the neural dynamics, but rather is identical to the intrinsic cause-effect structure itself, the view from inside of what these causal relations feel like when you are those causal relations, when there is no homunculus sitting somewhere else observing the process but only the process itself, recursively modeling its own modeling, predicting its own predictions.
The Hard Problem and Its Dissolution
The central debates in philosophy of mind:
- Chalmers’ Hard Problem (1995): The explanatory gap between physical processes and phenomenal experience. I think this gap results from a category error, not a genuine ontological divide.
- Nagel’s “What Is It Like” (1974): The subjective character of experience. I’ll formalize this as intrinsic cause-effect structure—what the system is for itself.
- Jackson’s Knowledge Argument (1982): Mary the colorblind scientist. My reinterpretation: Mary gains access to a new scale of description, not new facts about the same scale.
- Eliminativism (Churchland, 1981; Dennett, 1991): Consciousness as illusion. I reject this—the illusion would itself be experiential, hence self-refuting.
- Panpsychism (Chalmers, 2015; Goff, 2017): Experience as fundamental. I accept a version: cause-effect structure at any scale that takes/makes differences has a form of “being like.”
The Standard Formulation
The “hard problem” of consciousness asks: given a complete physical description of a system, why is there something it is like to be that system? How does experience arise from non-experience?
Formally, let be a complete physical description of a system—its particles, fields, dynamics, everything describable in third-person terms. The hard problem asserts:
where is a description of the system’s phenomenal properties (what it’s like to be it). The claim is that no amount of physical information logically entails phenomenal information.
This formulation rests on a crucial assumption: that physics constitutes a privileged ontological base layer. All other descriptions (chemical, biological, psychological, phenomenal) are "higher-level" and must reduce to or supervene on the physical description. What is "really real" is what physics describes.
I reject this.
Ontological Democracy
Consider the standard reductionist hierarchy:
At each level, one might claim the higher level “reduces to” the lower. But the regression terminates in uncertainty:
- Wave functions are descriptions of probability distributions
- Probability amplitudes describe which interactions are more or less likely
- What “actually happens” when a measurement occurs is deeply contested
- Below quantum fields, we have no clear ontology at all
The supposed “base layer” turns out to be:
- Probabilistic, not deterministic
- Descriptive, not fundamental (wave functions are representations)
- Incomplete (we don’t know what underlies field interactions)
- Not clearly more “real” than any other scale of description
The alternative is ontological democracy: every scale of structural organization with its own causal closure is equally real at that scale. No layer is privileged as “the” fundamental reality. Each layer (a) has its own causal structure, (b) has its own dynamics and laws, (c) exerts influence on adjacent layers (both “up” and “down”), (d) is incomplete as a description of the whole, and (e) is sufficient for phenomena at its scale.
Once this is granted, the demand that phenomenal properties “reduce to” physical properties is ill-posed. Chemistry doesn’t reduce to physics in a way that eliminates chemical causation—chemical causation is real at the chemical scale. Similarly, phenomenal properties don’t need to reduce to physical properties—they are real at the phenomenal scale.
Existence as Causal Participation
We need a criterion for existence that applies uniformly across scales—here "we" means anyone trying to think clearly about this.
The criterion I adopt is this: an entity exists at scale if and only if
That is, takes and makes differences at scale . It participates in causal relations at that scale.
Example.
- An electron exists at the quantum scale: it takes differences (responds to fields) and makes differences (affects measurements).
- A cell exists at the biological scale: it takes differences (nutrients, signals) and makes differences (metabolism, division, death).
- An experience exists at the phenomenal scale: it takes differences (sensory input, memory) and makes differences (attention, behavior, learning).
This is closely aligned with IIT’s foundational axiom: to exist is to have cause-effect power. But we extend it: cause-effect power at any scale constitutes existence at that scale, with no scale privileged.
The Dissolution
The hard problem asked: how do you get experience from non-experience? The answer is: you don’t need to.
Just as chemistry doesn’t emerge from non-chemistry—you have chemistry when you have the right causal organization at the chemical scale—experience doesn’t emerge from non-experience. You have experience when you have the right causal organization at the experiential scale.
The question “why is there something it’s like to be this system?” is exactly as deep as “why does chemistry exist?” or “why are there quantum fields?” I don’t know why there’s anything at all (idk if anybody does). But given that there’s anything, the emergence of self-modeling systems with integrated cause-effect structure is not mysterious—it’s typical.
The hard problem dissolves not because we answered it, but because we showed it was asking for a privilege (reduction to physics) that physics itself doesn't have.