The Hard Problem of Consciousness

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

The Problem Statement:

The hard problem of consciousness asks why any physical state creates conscious mental states at all. While we can understand physical systems very well, the hard problem goes further than merely asking “how” questions: “Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” For example, we can understand how our bodies physically feel pain, but why those physical reactions create the personal, subjective experience we call pain is unsolved.

A Proposed Solution:

Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that is best explained through multiple levels of emergence. The first level is cellular sentience. This is a set of physical reactions triggered by molecular contact that launches a cascade of chemical reactions that is complex beyond belief. Nature took 2 billion years of constant experimenting at the single-cell level to develop the myriad of metabolic pathways necessary for life. There was no mind involved, no nervous system, no nerves, no consciousness, and no experience—just biochemistry in service to helping the universe shed all the energy from the Big Bang.

The next level emerges with the appearance of multi-cellular organisms. These are collaboratives of cells that interoperate to enable behaviors impossible for a single cell to execute. Natural selection shapes these behaviors based on their ability to outperform other organisms in a competition for scarce resources. For the first time we encounter strategies for living, but they are entirely contained within genetic algorithms—so again, no mind, no nerves, no consciousness, no experience.

The next level emerges with the appearance of organs—specialized communities of cells that have their own internal structures while at the same time participating with other organs in a host structure. Organs communicate with each other to enable even more complex strategies for living. In plants, they do so through chemical signals carried by the plant’s vascular system. Despite all the strategic behavior this enables, there is still no mind, no consciousness, and no experience—just adaptive behavior, be that of sunflowers following the sun or roots seeking out access to water or nitrogen.

Consciousness appears on the scene with the emergence of nerves which communicate through chemically generated electrical signals interoperating with a brain that coordinates responses, evaluates feedback, creates memories, and learns strategies. Bees finding pollen and communicating it to the hive via dances have brains. Whether they have minds and whether they have experiences is an open question.

If we move up to more complex organisms such as pets or birds, we observe they do have minds and experiences. The reason they do is that Darwinism selected for them. Mind emerges from reinforced neural pathways that self-organize into subsystems and self-assemble into a larger whole. This is not the hard problem of consciousness, however, for we can explain it largely by referencing what computers do. The hard one is experience. Arguably computers can think, but they cannot experience. They do not participate in qualia. Dogs and birds, by contrast, do. So what do they have that computers don’t?

The answer is hormones. All living things self-manage their current state through the activity of homeostasis. This is a universal predisposition to gravitate toward a state of comfort and away from a state of discomfort. Comfort and discomfort are communicated through a network of hormones—chemical messengers that activate different organs to respond in characteristic ways. All strategies for living are driven by the desire to achieve homeostatic comfort—from bees and bats to boys and girls to you and me. 

Experience represents our engagement with qualia. Qualia are the signals by which we are informed about our homeostatic state. Consciousness needs this information in order to manage our strategy for living. We spend our lives responding to these signals with actions that maximize our homeostatic well-being. There is nothing mysterious going on here—bees do it, birds do it, even educated fleas do it.

So where does the mystery come in? It enters with language. Specifically, language used in service to narrative creates our experience of self. It allows human beings to be self-aware. That is, unlike any other living thing, we can be aware of being aware. It is that experience that separates us from all other life forms. It is not that we are that different. It is just that, as language-inflected beings, we think differently. This engenders a kind of alienation from other living things, one that we convert into a sense of human superiority, which we then struggle to justify, and, failing to do so, end up parking the whole business under a sign that reads “the hard problem of consciousness.”

Consciousness is not the hard problem. We are.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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