The Hard Problem of Consciousness Dissolves Under Inversion

Close your eyes for a second. What do you experience? Darkness. Your darkness. Intimate and personal. Someone who is standing right next to you could describe your darkness in exquisite detail: “The visual system is suppressed. No photons are entering the retina. Neural activity is low.” But what the person describes is not the darkness. The person is describing the darkness out in the world. The darkness is in you. It is not available to the person who is standing next to you. The difference between the description and the experience is the Hard Problem of Consciousness. It was named by philosopher David Chalmers. It’s been three decades since the Hard Problem was first articulated and no one has been able to solve it. This Paper takes another route to prove that the Hard promblem was asking the wrong question.