Consciousness is both very hard to study and very hard to explain. Some scientists might say “nonsense!”, but I’ve noticed that those scientists tend not to understand the meaning of consciousness in the first place — they assume it’s just information processing, like in a computer. If that were indeed the case, there’d be no hard problem at all.
Consciousness includes a number of phenomena that are essentially non-physical and non-objective:
- sentience — the ability to consciously experience changes to one’s existence, i.e. to subjectively sense stimuli and feel sensations;
- awareness — the conscious realisation of meaning both within and beyond one’s immediate sensory experience, i.e. perception and cognition;
- volition — the ability to set oneself conscious goals;
- agency — the ability to consciously initiate and control one’s own behaviour (acting on conscious goals);
- attention — the ability to set the current focus of one’s consciousness on certain stimuli or behaviours at the expense of others;
- self-awareness — the ability to pay attention to oneself, either internally, as a subject experiencing internal states and processes, or externally, as an object (person) in an environment.
All of these are intrinsically subjective, but scientific investigation requires objectivity.
In order to be objective, scientists must focus on that which is physically observable and measurable, yet every aspect of consciousness is, by definition, subjective. We therefore cannot observe or measure consciousness itself; we can only measure certain objective things that seem to correlate with it, such as brain activity.
The most direct way to study consciousness is through personal experience and the first-person perspective. For example, a scientist could take a mind-altering drug and experience the effects. But as soon as they publish an account of their experience, we are back to square one: their account is merely ‘subjective’. No matter how carefully they describe their experiences, the rest of the scientific community will be very reluctant to assume that their account is sufficiently valid and reliable to be of scientific value. After all, it lacks objectivity.
This is why scientists have traditionally avoided reliance on people’s subjective experiences and subjective accounts (such as “I feel some pain”, “I had a dream about a horse”; “I feel more intelligent today”). Such first-person accounts are, literally, purely subjective — their validity and reliability are unknown and impossible to verify objectively. What a person says of their subjective experiences could be clear and accurate, or it could be distorted, exaggerated, downplayed, biased, badly worded, imaginary, or even an outright lie — and there is no way of telling which.
And then we come to the real hard problem, the explanatory problem.
In a purely objective universe, there is no reason why subjective phenomena should exist. Objective causes have objective effects, and that’s that.
We can understand various chains of causality (cause and effect) in objective events and processes at an atomic level, at a molecular level, at a cellular level, at a physiological level, at a behavioural level … but there is no point in any such sequence of events at which they must or should or even can transform into conscious phenomena.
For example, we can objectively observe and explain the process of light entering the eye, stimulating the retina, generating signals that are sent along the optic nerve, triggering neural oscillations that are synchronised between different brain regions… But we can neither observe nor explain the subjective experience of seeing light, so we have no idea how that comes about. Even if we know that certain brainwave oscillations correlate with the seeing of light, that still tells us nothing about how or why seeing can possibly exist.
We experience light as visual images, and we are aware of what we see. We experience acoustic vibrations as sounds, and we are aware of what we hear. Yet in a strictly objective universe, there is no logical or mathematical reason why seeing, hearing, awareness, or any other such phenomenon should even exist.
This is the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness:
- The mission of science is to objectively observe and explain natural phenomena.
- Consciousness is a natural phenomenon, part of reality, but it is not objectively observable.
- Consciousness is that which makes reality itself observable and knowable, but is only evident to itself.
