The Hard Problem of Consciousness in a Nutshell

We are told that consciousness emerges from brain activity. It is a widely accepted theory that consciousness arises from the activity of neural networks and that create, due to their electrical and chemical signals, complex patterns giving rise to a conscious experience. It is believed that some specific brain regions play a key role in the emergence of consciousness, such as the prefrontal cortex, the parietal cortex, and the thalamus somehow integrate the information from different sensory inputs, creating a unified and coherent experience of the world.

After all, it sounds reasonable. If your brain falls into a comatose state, you are ‘unconscious’, right? If you take a drug that alters your brain chemistry, you will perceive the world from an altered state of consciousness. If your occipital lobes at the back of the head and responsible for visual perception are impaired due to an accident, you won’t be able to see anymore, even if your eyes are perfectly functioning.

So, what is the issue here? Isn’t it absolutely obvious that the brain ‘produces’ conscious experience?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that when we refer to that wet gray slimy matter that we call ‘the brain’, we are pointing at a material aggregate that is ultimately made of molecules and atoms that we believe to be devoid of any sentience, experience, sensory perceptions, feelings, emotions, thoughts–that is, all what makes up our conscious experience. The question is why does a combination of insentient and unconscious particles build up a brain that, nonetheless, is endowed with sentience, experience, sensory perceptions, feelings, emotions, and thoughts?

You might object that it is due to gazillions of super-complicated and hyper-complex processes and interactions in the brain that make a subjective experience emerge. But why should more complexity make us conscious? If you don’t find this mysterious, think about it again. Why should a bunch of unconscious atoms, molecules, and neurons put together, however, complicated their arrangement and sophisticated their interactions, give rise to a qualitative subjective experience (‘qualia’) of pain or pleasure, joy or grief, sensory or visual sensation, etc.?

This, in a nutshell, is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ first formulated by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995 (even though less neuroscientific formulations of it date back at least to the times of Leibniz), and which refers to the philosophical problem of understanding why and how subjective experiences arise from physical processes in the brain. There is a fundamental gap between the objective, third-person perspective of science and the subjective, first-person experience of consciousness. While science can explain how the brain processes information, it does not explain why that processing is accompanied by subjective experience. The hard problem is considered so ‘hard’ because it resists any scientific explanation. The relationship between the physicality of the world and our undefinable, ineffable but very concrete subjective experience remains unexplained.

The point is that, if we believe only and exclusively in what science proves to exist with third-person experiments or observations, and declare everything else as ‘non-existent’ or an ‘illusion’, then consciousness must be considered as inexistent and illusory as well.

Can you prove to be conscious to someone else? You can’t. Not even in principle. In fact, strictly speaking, if we believe only in what science can demonstrate, we will have to brand consciousness as an irrational belief, as something that does not exist, just collective hypnosis or superstition. In principle, science should reject the idea that you have feelings, sensations, or subjective experiences. Consciousness should be declared as a pseudo-scientific concept, since there is not the slightest empirical evidence showing that it exists. You will not find your consciousness opening your skull and rummaging inside your brain.

You might object that we can visualize brain activity thanks to modern brain scans, which correlate with our conscious experience. But, if you think carefully, that doesn’t prove anything. It merely shows that some electrical phenomenon in the brain correlates with someone claiming to have a sensation. How do you know that it is true? It could be an imitation, or the reaction of someone having no sensation at all but acting as if having one.

This sounds silly, isn’t it? Why do, nevertheless, even the most skeptical and materialist scientists accept that we are conscious? It is not difficult to see where the connection is made: Even scientists, believe it or not, are humans who have subjective experiences and can access their sensations by first-person introspection. If scientists accept that subjective conscious experiences ‘exist’ (whatever ‘existence’ might mean in this context) it is, paradoxically, only because of that kind of introspection that science always tried to avoid, discrediting it as unreliable and misleading in the first place.

This has created much of a cognitive dissonance to such a degree that nowadays there are also some philosophers, the so-called ‘eliminativist’, that deny consciousness any reality and brand it as an ‘illusion’ of the brain. But these are only a minority and, in my opinion, are like the Ptolemaics who stick to an old and dying paradigm or, worse, represent yet another form of denialism among many that characterize our modern times.

Trying to find the magic which transmutes neural activity in subjective sensations is reminiscent of the alchemists who believed it to be possible to transmute base metals into gold. The assumption was that the universe is made only by the four elements (or qualities) of water, air, fire, and earth. In a sense, modern science believes something similar, namely that the universe is made only by matter, forces, space, and time. Consciousness plays the role of the elephant in the room. And it will continue to do so until we will move away from a scientific materialism and naïve realism that got stuck in the 18-19^th-century.