Demystifying the Hardness in The Problem of Consciousness

Why, and how is it that some physical systems are conscious? Known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness, this question, whose roots reach back to the mind–body problem, was formulated in its contemporary form by David Chalmers within neuro-philosophy circles, and reflects a deeply rooted dualistic outlook, as well as one that is incoherent with a proper physicalist scientific framework [11, 57]. The so-called explanatory gap, the perceived inability to derive subjective experience (qualia) from objective physical processes, has been used to justify the hardness of the problem [34, 41]. I argue here that the gap argument is based on psychological discomfort rather than empirical evidence, and that if one adopts a fully physicalist scientific outlook, the hard problem and the gap both dissolve, since they are apriori ill-posed and cannot be addressed within such a framework. The belief that an explanatory gap exists is argued to be born from an illusory distinction that humans draw between their generated external and internal world models. Furthermore, I suggest that the explanatory gap in the Hard Problem is identical in essence to the same gap in questions such as, “why is there something rather than nothing in the universe?” or “why does matter have the properties that it does?”. Even within a strictly scientific and physicalist outlook, I speculate why the Hard Problem and its accompanying explanatory gap remain so intuitively compelling, and why we would continue to feel that something is missing, even if a complete physicalist explanation of consciousness were to be achieved.