The Hard Problems

David Chalmers' famous "Hard Problem" is to explain how subjective conscious experience can arise from the physical world. Many scientists and philosophers take this to be a daunting barrier to any future deep understanding of consciousness.

But taking a step back, subjective conscious experience is really the only thing we have direct, immediate access to. For a while I found it interesting/ironic that despite the fact that my subjective experience was really the only thing I had, everyone else's (per the Hard Problem) was forever inaccessible. However – precisely because subjective experience is the only thing we really have – nothing but our consciousness is directly accessible to us.

This immediately suggests a dual to The Hard Problem: How can an objective understanding of the physical world arise from pure subjective consciousness? In the case of this "Dual Problem", we have more or less achieved this mysterious understanding of the physical world without solving the problem. In fact, we have been so successful that The Dual Problem is often not even worried about; we take it for granted that it is possible and we proceed to do it.

Could this be a hint as to how the Hard Problem will be "solved"? i.e. Not so much solved as side-stepped, made into a philosophical curiosity rather than a blocker to explanatory power.

If so, Chalmers' Hard Problem would be one of a number of other closely related problems: "The Hard Problems."

The Hard Problems:

• Chalmers' Hard problem: How can subjective experience arise from the physical world?
• Chalmers' Dual Problem: How can an objective description of the physical world arise from subjective experience alone?
• Wigner's Hard Problem: Why is math so unreasonably effective at describing the physical world ?
• Wigner's Dual Problem: How can the physical (finite) world give us access to mathematical truth ?
• Plato's Hard Problem: How can mathematical truth arise/be discovered from subjective experience alone ?
• Plato's Dual Problem: (Assuming we bypass the Hard Problem as we did the The Dual problem …) Why does mathematics describe our subjective experience so well ?

All of these Hard Problems are deep unsolved mysteries. I would say none are obviously harder than the others and several have been effectively side-stepped. Seen in this light, Chalmers' Hard Problem is not some impenetrable frontier that will inevitably block progress in explaining consciousness. It doesn't seem as daunting. It is part of a legacy of deep mysteries that we have been struggling with for 2000 years and will presumably continue to struggle with, all the while making progress and gaining a deeper understanding of physics, math, and consciousness.

https://johnalison.substack.com/p/the-hard-problems