Resolving the Mind Combination Problem with Existing Science

Mainstream science views the human mind as generated by the brain, yet despite centuries of brain research no evidence has been to support this hypothesis. While several conceptual frameworks have been developed, no scientific theory exists to explain how physical processes inside the brain can produce the vibrant conscious experiences of our minds. This is widely known as the “Hard Problem of Consciousness”, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. While the hard problem has existed for millennia in many forms, Chalmer’s articulation distilled the essence of the problem by illustrating the difficulty in explaining qualitative subjective experience (e.g. the feeling of beauty watching a sunset or of feeling pain from a broken bone) using the quantitative properties and equations of science. Conscious experiences are “qualitative” in nature, lacking any “quantitative” properties whatsoever. Consider the sweet taste of chocolate, the pungent smell of a skunk, the feeling of beauty when watching a sunset, excitement, anxiety, love, thoughts, memories, pain, and so on. These experiences have no units of measure and cannot be reduced to quantitative variables and equations. The mind is a “mental” phenomenon whereas science describes “physical” phenomena. Our minds “experience” the world from an “internal, 1st person, and subjective” point of view that is completely private to each of us. Meanwhile physical science describes the “behavior” of objects in our world from an “external, 3rd person, and objective” point of view that is publicly observable and quantitatively measurable with scientific instrumentation. Quantitative vs. qualitative, objective vs. subjective, 1st person vs. 3rd person, internal vs. external, experience vs. behavior, and physical vs. mental. Each of these characteristics are complete opposites of one another, which explains why the “quantitative, 3rd person, objective, physical, external behavior” theories of science have been unable to explain the “qualitative, 1st person, subjective, internal, mental experiences” of the mind. The hard problem remains one of the most intractable problems in the entirety of science. The hypothesis that the human mind emerges from brain processes is rooted in the metaphysics of materialism, which posits that everything in the universe can be explained by scientific laws that govern the behavior of matter and energy. Other metaphysical views can avoid the hard problem but face their own unique problems. Dualist views posit the mind is a separate non-physical property or substance that interacts with matter, raising the “Mind-Body Problem” which questions how a non-physical mind can interact with a physical body. Idealist views posit mind is the only fundamental thing that exists and that matter is derivative from universal mind, raising the “Decombination Problem” which questions how human bodies and minds can be split off from a universal mind. Panpsychist views posit that mind and matter are intertwined phenomena at all scales of the universe, raising the “Combination Problem” which questions how the individual minds of elementary particles can combine to form the more complex minds of atoms, molecules, cells, and ultimately humans. The combination problem traces back to 1890 when philosopher William James challenged panpsychism by arguing that individual conscious experiences cannot be combined to form a single unified conscious experience. James’ challenge has withstood the test of time as many solutions have been proposed but none have received widespread support from philosophers and scientists. Most of these solutions analyze the properties of complex minds and use reductionist logic to deduce the properties of more rudimentary forms of mind and then infer how they might be able to combine. The present solution takes the opposite approach by starting with the hypo