I think both thought experiments — Mary and the zombie case — assume part of what they are supposed to prove. They suggest that something important is missing, but they never give clear criteria for what exactly is missing, where it is, or how it is supposed to differ from the rest of the system. So the real problem may be that the “hard problem” is framed in the wrong way. If we do not even know clearly what the explanatory gap is, then maybe we are asking the wrong question. Instead of treating subjective experience as a mysterious extra thing, we should look for the processes that create the impression of personal experience.
And then a deeper question appears: is that impression actually a necessary part of consciousness? To be special, do we really need the feeling that we are special?
I think your comment gets close to something important, but it may also shift the problem rather than resolve it.
You suggest that instead of treating subjective experience as a mysterious extra, we should look for the processes that create the *impression* of personal experience.
But an impression is already a form of experience.
If a system produces an “impression,” the question immediately becomes: impression for whom?
Replacing experience with “the impression of experience” doesn't eliminate the explanatory gap. It simply moves the same problem one step back.
This may be why the hard problem persists. It assumes that consciousness is something produced inside a system, like an additional feature generated by physical processes.
But experience might not be something added to the system at all.
It may be the field within which any system, explanation, or theory appears in the first place.
If that is the case, then the hard problem is not a missing mechanism but a framing error: we keep trying to explain the condition of appearance as if it were an object within what appears.
Well, that's the good point. My first comment was a bit compressed. So I'll try to elaborate a little.
What I was trying to say is this: a lot of the confusion starts when we assume a dualist picture in the background. We imagine a system that produces experiences for a separate subject that receives them. Then the question “for whom?” appears immediately.
But if we drop that split, the perspective changes. Experience can be understood as one of the processes of the system itself, not something added on top of it.
In that view the subject is not a separate receiver of experience. The subject is more like a stable pattern inside the process of experience — a kind of self-referential effect of the system. So instead of asking “who receives the experience,” the question becomes how a system can generate a stable perspective within its own activity.
That shift alone already changes how the problem looks.
BTW: I just posted articles about dualism and its logical consequences. Check out my profile, you might find it interesting.
I think your move away from dualism is important, but there may still be a hidden assumption in your framing.
You suggest that experience can be understood as one of the processes of the system itself, and that the subject is a stable pattern within that process.
But describing processes, patterns, and dynamics only explains how a system organizes information and behavior. It does not explain why any of that should be accompanied by experience at all.
A complete physical or functional description of a system can account for signals, representations, feedback loops, and stable perspectives. Yet none of those descriptions contains the fact that there is something it is like for the system.
That gap is precisely what the hard problem points to.
So the issue may not simply be dualism versus non-dualism. The deeper question is whether consciousness is something produced within a system, or whether it is the condition within which systems and processes appear in the first place.
You are right that this is not so simple, and I agree that my move away from dualism does not solve the whole problem of consciousness. I only wanted to show that dualism may not be the right starting point for framing the question in the first place. In other words, I m not claiming that the system view explains everything. I m only trying to remove one obstacle that may be built into the way the problem is formulated. When you say that a description of processe does not explain “why there is something it is like,” the question already assumes that experience must be something added to the system. That is precisely the dualist intuition I was trying to expose. If we keep that assumption, the gap will always appear.
I m suggesting is that the gap might be a consequence of that framing. If experience is not something produced for a separate subject, but part of the dynamics of the system itself, then the problem may look different. That does not mean it is solved. It only means we may be asking the question from the wrong angle. We still don’t understand how experience works at every level. But without dualism the explanatory gap becomes a missing mechanism, not a metaphysical problem.
I think your clarification is helpful, and I agree that removing the dualist picture changes how the problem appears.
But I’m not sure the gap comes only from the assumption that experience is something added to a system.
Even if we fully describe the dynamics of a system — signals, feedback loops, stable perspectives, information integration — those descriptions remain third-person descriptions of processes.
The question “why is there something it is like” points to the difference between a complete functional description and the fact that the system appears from a first-person perspective at all.
So the issue may not be dualism versus non-dualism. It may be that we are trying to explain the condition of appearance using the same conceptual tools we use to describe what appears.
If that is the case, the explanatory gap may not be just a missing mechanism, but a mismatch between levels of description.
I think your point about a mismatch between levels of description is good. But part of the difficulty may come from still framing the problem as if we needed a bridge between two different kinds of things — third-person processes and first-person experience.
If experience is understood as emerging from the organization of processes within the system, then the difference between these perspectives is not a gap between substances but a difference in description - just like you pointed. The real mistake is to ontologize those descriptive layers and treat them as separate domains of reality.
So, from this perspective, it's both the missing mechanisms and how they're emerging to the different levels - but of course, not everything is missing, we still have a lot.
Look at it from this perspective, and in fact the “hard problem” disappears:
Plants do not have consciousness, yet they “know” that their roots must sink into the soil and their leaves must turn toward the light. To secure their existence, they encode their genetic code in seeds and use the environment - water and wind - to disperse. In this way, plants conquered the planet.
Animals - almost all species larger than a few millimeters - have acquired the ability to move within a complex environment. The larger ones can orient themselves, search for food, fight, feel pain, distinguish colors, experience empathy, and live socially. Nearly all vertebrates and mammals do this. And of course, they also experience the subjective pleasure of sex.
Humans possess all the abilities of animals, but here there is something additional: humans have acquired a new capacity to project imagination. This is the only “addition” that has made the difference.
But where does this addition come from?
In fact, it is simply an evolution of the same ability animals have to orient themselves in a complex environment. A large cat can run like an athlete, hunt with great precision, and navigate a changing environment. This is very close to the human ability that integrates all these capacities, plus the ability to plan for what may happen in the future. And this can be explained entirely by the growth of structural complexity and the capacity to integrate additional information.
Yes, I agree that evolution and biological processes should be our starting point when we look for an empirical explanation of consciousness. Otherwise we lose our connection with reality and end up discussing purely abstract puzzles.
At the same time, we should be careful not to reduce everything to simple evolutionary mechanisms or to something like “fitness maximization.” That kind of reductionism can be just as misleading as the hard problem itself. Both approaches risk turning the discussion into a dead end.
What seems more promising is to examine consciousness without assuming in advance what it must be — without special metaphysical privileges, but also without reducing it too quickly to a single biological principle.
When we approach the problem this way, a number of interesting questions appear. And in my view they may be much more interesting than the traditional debate suggests.
I will present the full argument on this point later (I have a commitment right now), but the essence of what I intend to argue is the following:
In fact, there is no reductionism here at all—quite the opposite. It is entirely sufficient to explain that (human) consciousness is the most complex form of organization of the three forces that underlie empirical reality:
Coherence (C) – the preservation of identity through time
Interaction (I) – influence and responsiveness
Complexity (K) – organization above a minimal threshold
I call this The Elemental Reason.
Science has always measured exclusively these three dimensions: C, I, and K. In fact, the Universe itself is the Proof of Work of these three archaic forces.
I see you're not wasting time — straight to a theory of everything. Respect for ambition.
My own ambitions are much more modest. I m not trying to explain life, the universe and everything. What interests me is something simpler but, I think, still tricky: the logical structure of the questions themselves.
Often before we try to answer a big question, it’s useful to check whether the question is even wellposed. A surprising number of philosophical problems disappear once the structure is clarified.
So my aim here is mostly analytical: to examine interesting problems, sometimes clarify them, and occasionally see what follows from the logic. Whether we get final answers is another matter — I’m quite skeptical about that.
But, If you re planning to develop this into a full paper, feel free to send it to me. I can’t promise a full review, but I can try to evaluate the logical structure of the argument.
Thank you for your irony - I accept it. In fact, I am also laughing at myself.
And you are right about how important the right question is.
I will not go into details here, but I have always been intrigued by Heraclitus and his statement that “you cannot step into the same river twice.” Later, I spent much of my youth reading everything others had written about being, matter, body, and soul. What I noticed was that the division between them kept deepening, despite the progress of science.
Then I began to wonder:
What is common across all scales of reality?
The path that led me to Coherence, Interaction, and Complexity is a story in itself, and I will not unfold it here. But the great irony is that these three dimensions were “hidden in plain sight.”
I will not elaborate further now, but if you allow me, I will write to you privately in the coming days about The Elemental Reason. And, setting modesty aside for a moment — ironic or not — the people before us were human too. Just like you, just like me.🙂
The text is well written and has a rhythm that makes it engaging to read, but the philosophical argument on which it rests is much weaker than it appears at first glance. David Chalmers’ thought experiments are not truly “powerful thought experiments,” but imaginative scenarios that fail to meet even the minimal conditions of a philosophical test. The fact that someone can imagine a “philosophical zombie” proves nothing about the structure of reality; otherwise we would also have to take seriously talking stones, witches flying on broomsticks, or time travel. Imagination is a valuable human faculty, but it is not a method for determining the ontological limits of the world.
Moreover, the text creates the misleading impression that subjective experience is an exclusively human phenomenon. This does not align with what we know from biology and neuroscience. Pain, fear, color perception, and spatial orientation are experiences shared by most vertebrates and many mammals. This means that what we call qualia is not an isolated mystery of the human mind, but a phenomenon that appears gradually in evolution, together with the increasing complexity of nervous systems.
This is precisely where the real problem with the way the “hard problem” is framed becomes evident. It is not solved by inventing imaginary scenarios, but by understanding the real conditions under which experience arises. If we look at the biological world, one fact becomes clear: subjective experience does not appear in simple systems, but only where there is a deep integration of neural processes within a highly complex and stable structure.
In other words, qualia is not a mysterious addition to matter. It becomes possible only when the complexity of a system reaches a level where information, interaction, and organization are internally integrated into a single functional unity. Only at that point does what we call experience emerge. In this sense, qualia is not a metaphysical enigma, but a direct consequence of the internal integration of maximal complexity.
This leads us to a deeper question that is usually overlooked in discussions about consciousness: what are the minimal conditions that make the existence of a real phenomenon possible, whether physical or mental? If every process that can be experienced requires structural stability, real interaction with the environment, and a sufficient level of complexity to integrate information into a coherent whole, then experience is no longer a mystery detached from nature, but a manifestation of the organization of matter at its highest levels. From this perspective, consciousness and qualia do not stand outside physical reality, but represent particular configurations of it.
If you would like further arguments showing that the Hard Problem has already been resolved, I would be glad to share them with you.
First, I think that Chalmers invented this problem starting from mistaken assumptions. And I believe the arguments for that can already be found in the comment above.
Second, in my view the real problem is not Chalmers himself, but the system that for more than thirty years has promoted such a weak construction as the “hard problem.” To call “powerful thought experiments” what are essentially weak imaginative scenarios is something for which I find it difficult to even find an appropriate name.
Third, Chalmers is fully within his rights to write books and raise problems, and to do everything possible to promote his work. That is absolutely legitimate. But accepting poorly constructed and artificially manufactured questions as “unsolved problems” is itself a real problem.
The “hard problem of consciousness” may not be a problem about the brain at all.
It may be a problem about how we frame experience.
When we ask why neural processes produce experience, we are already standing outside the experience we are trying to explain. We have stepped into a descriptive stance where the world is divided into objects, mechanisms, and observers.
From that position, consciousness appears mysterious.
We see neurons firing, electrical signals moving through circuits, algorithms producing responses. None of that looks like “what it feels like” to see red or hear music.
But this gap appears only because we begin from the wrong direction.
Experience is not something added to the world after the machinery is described.
Experience is the field within which any description of machinery appears in the first place.
In other words: the so-called hard problem emerges when we treat consciousness as an object among other objects. Yet consciousness is not an object. It is the condition under which objects, explanations, and theories become possible.
Your phone illustrates this beautifully.
The device may simulate understanding, respond intelligently, and even appear conversational. But the question “does it experience anything?” reveals something deeper: the difference between functioning and appearing.
Functioning can be described.
Appearing cannot be reduced to description.
What philosophers call the “hard problem” may therefore be less a scientific puzzle than a conceptual misalignment. We keep trying to explain experience from the outside, while experience is always already the inside of whatever appears.
Seen this way, the mystery is not why matter produces experience.
The mystery is that we keep forgetting that every explanation already unfolds within it.
I think both thought experiments — Mary and the zombie case — assume part of what they are supposed to prove. They suggest that something important is missing, but they never give clear criteria for what exactly is missing, where it is, or how it is supposed to differ from the rest of the system. So the real problem may be that the “hard problem” is framed in the wrong way. If we do not even know clearly what the explanatory gap is, then maybe we are asking the wrong question. Instead of treating subjective experience as a mysterious extra thing, we should look for the processes that create the impression of personal experience.
And then a deeper question appears: is that impression actually a necessary part of consciousness? To be special, do we really need the feeling that we are special?
I think your comment gets close to something important, but it may also shift the problem rather than resolve it.
You suggest that instead of treating subjective experience as a mysterious extra, we should look for the processes that create the *impression* of personal experience.
But an impression is already a form of experience.
If a system produces an “impression,” the question immediately becomes: impression for whom?
Replacing experience with “the impression of experience” doesn't eliminate the explanatory gap. It simply moves the same problem one step back.
This may be why the hard problem persists. It assumes that consciousness is something produced inside a system, like an additional feature generated by physical processes.
But experience might not be something added to the system at all.
It may be the field within which any system, explanation, or theory appears in the first place.
If that is the case, then the hard problem is not a missing mechanism but a framing error: we keep trying to explain the condition of appearance as if it were an object within what appears.
Well, that's the good point. My first comment was a bit compressed. So I'll try to elaborate a little.
What I was trying to say is this: a lot of the confusion starts when we assume a dualist picture in the background. We imagine a system that produces experiences for a separate subject that receives them. Then the question “for whom?” appears immediately.
But if we drop that split, the perspective changes. Experience can be understood as one of the processes of the system itself, not something added on top of it.
In that view the subject is not a separate receiver of experience. The subject is more like a stable pattern inside the process of experience — a kind of self-referential effect of the system. So instead of asking “who receives the experience,” the question becomes how a system can generate a stable perspective within its own activity.
That shift alone already changes how the problem looks.
BTW: I just posted articles about dualism and its logical consequences. Check out my profile, you might find it interesting.
I think your move away from dualism is important, but there may still be a hidden assumption in your framing.
You suggest that experience can be understood as one of the processes of the system itself, and that the subject is a stable pattern within that process.
But describing processes, patterns, and dynamics only explains how a system organizes information and behavior. It does not explain why any of that should be accompanied by experience at all.
A complete physical or functional description of a system can account for signals, representations, feedback loops, and stable perspectives. Yet none of those descriptions contains the fact that there is something it is like for the system.
That gap is precisely what the hard problem points to.
So the issue may not simply be dualism versus non-dualism. The deeper question is whether consciousness is something produced within a system, or whether it is the condition within which systems and processes appear in the first place.
You are right that this is not so simple, and I agree that my move away from dualism does not solve the whole problem of consciousness. I only wanted to show that dualism may not be the right starting point for framing the question in the first place. In other words, I m not claiming that the system view explains everything. I m only trying to remove one obstacle that may be built into the way the problem is formulated. When you say that a description of processe does not explain “why there is something it is like,” the question already assumes that experience must be something added to the system. That is precisely the dualist intuition I was trying to expose. If we keep that assumption, the gap will always appear.
I m suggesting is that the gap might be a consequence of that framing. If experience is not something produced for a separate subject, but part of the dynamics of the system itself, then the problem may look different. That does not mean it is solved. It only means we may be asking the question from the wrong angle. We still don’t understand how experience works at every level. But without dualism the explanatory gap becomes a missing mechanism, not a metaphysical problem.
I think your clarification is helpful, and I agree that removing the dualist picture changes how the problem appears.
But I’m not sure the gap comes only from the assumption that experience is something added to a system.
Even if we fully describe the dynamics of a system — signals, feedback loops, stable perspectives, information integration — those descriptions remain third-person descriptions of processes.
The question “why is there something it is like” points to the difference between a complete functional description and the fact that the system appears from a first-person perspective at all.
So the issue may not be dualism versus non-dualism. It may be that we are trying to explain the condition of appearance using the same conceptual tools we use to describe what appears.
If that is the case, the explanatory gap may not be just a missing mechanism, but a mismatch between levels of description.
I think your point about a mismatch between levels of description is good. But part of the difficulty may come from still framing the problem as if we needed a bridge between two different kinds of things — third-person processes and first-person experience.
If experience is understood as emerging from the organization of processes within the system, then the difference between these perspectives is not a gap between substances but a difference in description - just like you pointed. The real mistake is to ontologize those descriptive layers and treat them as separate domains of reality.
So, from this perspective, it's both the missing mechanisms and how they're emerging to the different levels - but of course, not everything is missing, we still have a lot.
Look at it from this perspective, and in fact the “hard problem” disappears:
Plants do not have consciousness, yet they “know” that their roots must sink into the soil and their leaves must turn toward the light. To secure their existence, they encode their genetic code in seeds and use the environment - water and wind - to disperse. In this way, plants conquered the planet.
Animals - almost all species larger than a few millimeters - have acquired the ability to move within a complex environment. The larger ones can orient themselves, search for food, fight, feel pain, distinguish colors, experience empathy, and live socially. Nearly all vertebrates and mammals do this. And of course, they also experience the subjective pleasure of sex.
Humans possess all the abilities of animals, but here there is something additional: humans have acquired a new capacity to project imagination. This is the only “addition” that has made the difference.
But where does this addition come from?
In fact, it is simply an evolution of the same ability animals have to orient themselves in a complex environment. A large cat can run like an athlete, hunt with great precision, and navigate a changing environment. This is very close to the human ability that integrates all these capacities, plus the ability to plan for what may happen in the future. And this can be explained entirely by the growth of structural complexity and the capacity to integrate additional information.
Yes, I agree that evolution and biological processes should be our starting point when we look for an empirical explanation of consciousness. Otherwise we lose our connection with reality and end up discussing purely abstract puzzles.
At the same time, we should be careful not to reduce everything to simple evolutionary mechanisms or to something like “fitness maximization.” That kind of reductionism can be just as misleading as the hard problem itself. Both approaches risk turning the discussion into a dead end.
What seems more promising is to examine consciousness without assuming in advance what it must be — without special metaphysical privileges, but also without reducing it too quickly to a single biological principle.
When we approach the problem this way, a number of interesting questions appear. And in my view they may be much more interesting than the traditional debate suggests.
I will present the full argument on this point later (I have a commitment right now), but the essence of what I intend to argue is the following:
In fact, there is no reductionism here at all—quite the opposite. It is entirely sufficient to explain that (human) consciousness is the most complex form of organization of the three forces that underlie empirical reality:
Coherence (C) – the preservation of identity through time
Interaction (I) – influence and responsiveness
Complexity (K) – organization above a minimal threshold
I call this The Elemental Reason.
Science has always measured exclusively these three dimensions: C, I, and K. In fact, the Universe itself is the Proof of Work of these three archaic forces.
I see you're not wasting time — straight to a theory of everything. Respect for ambition.
My own ambitions are much more modest. I m not trying to explain life, the universe and everything. What interests me is something simpler but, I think, still tricky: the logical structure of the questions themselves.
Often before we try to answer a big question, it’s useful to check whether the question is even wellposed. A surprising number of philosophical problems disappear once the structure is clarified.
So my aim here is mostly analytical: to examine interesting problems, sometimes clarify them, and occasionally see what follows from the logic. Whether we get final answers is another matter — I’m quite skeptical about that.
But, If you re planning to develop this into a full paper, feel free to send it to me. I can’t promise a full review, but I can try to evaluate the logical structure of the argument.
Thank you for your irony - I accept it. In fact, I am also laughing at myself.
And you are right about how important the right question is.
I will not go into details here, but I have always been intrigued by Heraclitus and his statement that “you cannot step into the same river twice.” Later, I spent much of my youth reading everything others had written about being, matter, body, and soul. What I noticed was that the division between them kept deepening, despite the progress of science.
Then I began to wonder:
What is common across all scales of reality?
The path that led me to Coherence, Interaction, and Complexity is a story in itself, and I will not unfold it here. But the great irony is that these three dimensions were “hidden in plain sight.”
I will not elaborate further now, but if you allow me, I will write to you privately in the coming days about The Elemental Reason. And, setting modesty aside for a moment — ironic or not — the people before us were human too. Just like you, just like me.🙂
The text is well written and has a rhythm that makes it engaging to read, but the philosophical argument on which it rests is much weaker than it appears at first glance. David Chalmers’ thought experiments are not truly “powerful thought experiments,” but imaginative scenarios that fail to meet even the minimal conditions of a philosophical test. The fact that someone can imagine a “philosophical zombie” proves nothing about the structure of reality; otherwise we would also have to take seriously talking stones, witches flying on broomsticks, or time travel. Imagination is a valuable human faculty, but it is not a method for determining the ontological limits of the world.
Moreover, the text creates the misleading impression that subjective experience is an exclusively human phenomenon. This does not align with what we know from biology and neuroscience. Pain, fear, color perception, and spatial orientation are experiences shared by most vertebrates and many mammals. This means that what we call qualia is not an isolated mystery of the human mind, but a phenomenon that appears gradually in evolution, together with the increasing complexity of nervous systems.
This is precisely where the real problem with the way the “hard problem” is framed becomes evident. It is not solved by inventing imaginary scenarios, but by understanding the real conditions under which experience arises. If we look at the biological world, one fact becomes clear: subjective experience does not appear in simple systems, but only where there is a deep integration of neural processes within a highly complex and stable structure.
In other words, qualia is not a mysterious addition to matter. It becomes possible only when the complexity of a system reaches a level where information, interaction, and organization are internally integrated into a single functional unity. Only at that point does what we call experience emerge. In this sense, qualia is not a metaphysical enigma, but a direct consequence of the internal integration of maximal complexity.
This leads us to a deeper question that is usually overlooked in discussions about consciousness: what are the minimal conditions that make the existence of a real phenomenon possible, whether physical or mental? If every process that can be experienced requires structural stability, real interaction with the environment, and a sufficient level of complexity to integrate information into a coherent whole, then experience is no longer a mystery detached from nature, but a manifestation of the organization of matter at its highest levels. From this perspective, consciousness and qualia do not stand outside physical reality, but represent particular configurations of it.
If you would like further arguments showing that the Hard Problem has already been resolved, I would be glad to share them with you.
That's right. The hard problem is outdated. We've been going around this for 30 years and nothing has come of it.
Yes please i like to jear why the problem is solved. But before that i'd like to hear a precise formulation of the problem.
First, I think that Chalmers invented this problem starting from mistaken assumptions. And I believe the arguments for that can already be found in the comment above.
Second, in my view the real problem is not Chalmers himself, but the system that for more than thirty years has promoted such a weak construction as the “hard problem.” To call “powerful thought experiments” what are essentially weak imaginative scenarios is something for which I find it difficult to even find an appropriate name.
Third, Chalmers is fully within his rights to write books and raise problems, and to do everything possible to promote his work. That is absolutely legitimate. But accepting poorly constructed and artificially manufactured questions as “unsolved problems” is itself a real problem.
The “hard problem of consciousness” may not be a problem about the brain at all.
It may be a problem about how we frame experience.
When we ask why neural processes produce experience, we are already standing outside the experience we are trying to explain. We have stepped into a descriptive stance where the world is divided into objects, mechanisms, and observers.
From that position, consciousness appears mysterious.
We see neurons firing, electrical signals moving through circuits, algorithms producing responses. None of that looks like “what it feels like” to see red or hear music.
But this gap appears only because we begin from the wrong direction.
Experience is not something added to the world after the machinery is described.
Experience is the field within which any description of machinery appears in the first place.
In other words: the so-called hard problem emerges when we treat consciousness as an object among other objects. Yet consciousness is not an object. It is the condition under which objects, explanations, and theories become possible.
Your phone illustrates this beautifully.
The device may simulate understanding, respond intelligently, and even appear conversational. But the question “does it experience anything?” reveals something deeper: the difference between functioning and appearing.
Functioning can be described.
Appearing cannot be reduced to description.
What philosophers call the “hard problem” may therefore be less a scientific puzzle than a conceptual misalignment. We keep trying to explain experience from the outside, while experience is always already the inside of whatever appears.
Seen this way, the mystery is not why matter produces experience.
The mystery is that we keep forgetting that every explanation already unfolds within it.
I highly recommend reading “Reality + “ by David Chalmers and I hope to reread his fascinating book.