Overview: The Hard Problem Resolved (Chapter 1)

Overview of the case made in a book that argues that the hard problem of consciousness is epistemological, perspectival, and resolvable, rather than ontological and irresolvable. The brain as we see and otherwise sense it is the reality as known rather than the reality as such. If the same is true of our conscious experiences, it becomes possible that the hard problem is epistemological and resolvable. Conscious experiences may be ontologically reducible to certain brain states but have knowledge content that, for purely perspectival reasons, is epistemologically irreducible to an outside observer's knowledge of the brain states. If so, there is no hard problem, no explanatory gap. Everything about a conscious experience, including its irreducible knowledge content, is subsumed within the reality known to an outside observer as a brain state and everything about it – including why it is 'like this' and why it is 'like anything' – can be identified and explained in externally observed terms. (The brain states should be unique in ways that will make the resulting accounts plausible and satisfactory.). We need not explain how the brain states transform themselves into the conscious experiences. This does not happen, except through a shift in perspective. A particular conscious experience and brain state are simply the same physical thing known in irreconcilably different ways. A full account of a given conscious experience and brain state consists of a full external observer's explanation of the brain state mapped to our irreducible inner view of what the conscious experience is like (relatively trivial information but essential to a complete account).