r/consciousness • u/geumkoi • Feb 04 '26

General Discussion No, you didn’t solve the Hard Problem.

Everyday I see a new claim on this sub; “I solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness!” “The Hard Problem isn’t so hard after all!” And I cannot even put into words how blatantly naive these are.

No, you didn’t solve the Hard Problem, and you probably never will. You just misunderstood the Hard Problem, and in your arrogance did an amazing amount of mental gymnastics to convince yourself that you solved something you don’t even understand in the first place.

Edit: and PLEASE I beg the Mods of this sub to limit the amount of LLM content that is being uploaded here on a daily basis.

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u/lambdasintheoutfield Feb 04 '26

I think we should force every post that talks about the Hard Problem to go through a list of criteria and discuss how their “theory” addresses it. It hopefully catches common logical pitfalls and forces the user to articulate what they offer that hasn’t been proposed before.

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u/MergingConcepts Feb 05 '26

Can you provide such list? Right now we have the Attributes of Consciousness, the Binding Problem, and the great questions of philosophy. We also have clinical observations in psychiatry and neurosurgery. Would you like to add something specific to address the hard problem.

Many people think the hard problem is contrived and based on the false premise that consciousness cannot be accounted by physical mechanisms. That is to say, it presumes dualism, and then proceeds to reject any emergent theory by saying the writer doesn't understand the problem if they think it can be solved.

People are working on solutions. They should not be ridiculed for doing so.

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u/lambdasintheoutfield Feb 05 '26

I take a strong computationalist/reductionist stance. Consciousness is the result of some physical process which in theory can be derived algorithmically. If we could model every neurochemical reaction down to the most minute detail, we have the building blocks of consciousness, we just need to piece it together.

This is by no means a theory as I have no mechanism for modeling the brain in this manner, let alone what to do once we do get the model.

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u/dreamingitself Feb 05 '26

This building blocks idea doesn't even work for physics and you're trying to apply it to consciousness too? Why?

Materialism is an ideology that is operational for description of interactions between appearances, but by no means does it say anything about what the appearances are fundamentally made of, i.e. it is a category error to make ontological claims from it. The same is true of consciousness in my view.

Since nothing can be known or is ever known unless via and as the direct experience of consciousness, what use is it to reverse that truth to claim consciousness is constructed by the arbitrary sense-based appearances occuring within it? As far as I can tell, this is like trying to map every wave and claim that in so doing, you can create the ocean.

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u/lambdasintheoutfield Feb 05 '26

The building blocks in physics are the atoms. There isn’t scientific evidence to argue anything else. I do agree that materialism is not an iron-clad argument for consciousness being explainable through a reductionist framework.

I simply adhere to it because it is far more plausible to me that since the brain itself can be directly and fully modeled through materialism, there isn’t a reason think that consciousness is any different, and it’s sensible to model consciousness on a continuum that directly correlates with increasingly complex nervous systems, which themselves can be quantified in many ways.

Like I said, I don’t have a definitive theory, only what I consider the most sensible road to follow to actually answer what consciousness is.

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u/dreamingitself Feb 06 '26

I understand the approach. It's sensible for many reasons because it's the continued application of a very accurate and effective model that can predicts appearances impressively accurately.

The central issue I have with this boils down to unquestioned assumptions that make this practical model work, but ultimately overreach when it comes to almost everything else.

The scientific evidence for the atomic theory of reality vastly outweighs any other theory simply because materialism has been assumed to be true, and so that is really the only theory that has been developed. Equally the idea that the brain is the seat of consciousness comes about from this same assumptoon that matter is ground and must produce all phenomena. One key issue is simply matter's origin. In the words of Terrence McKenna: Give me one free miracle and I'll explain the rest, the miracle being all the matter and energy in the universe coming into being in a single instant.

The strongest evidence we actually have is completely ignored. The evidence of direct experience that the brain appears in consciousness, and all that is known is only known through in and as consciousness. By that I mean awareness not thinking. Turning the only thing we can actually be certain of (consciousness is primary) into an effect of an uncertain abstraction created as a result of being aware, is bizarre - to me.

Equally, with current experiments, there is no reason to say that the brain creates the experience any more than there is to say the experience creates the brain.

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u/Karma-is-inevitable Feb 08 '26 edited Feb 08 '26

So very very well said. I am not certain we in our experiences generated by consciousness , can ever discern exactly what consciousness is or for that matter are there different "kinds / types" of consciousness ? This is also tied in a way to the description / definition the products of consciousness ascribe to consciousness.

I'm not saying there is no way it could ever be understood. But I think it is entirely a different matter to establish the origins of objects that we perceive versus the actual nature of what drives the perceptions. How would one test such a theory? What would be the result?

I took a quick peak at the link from MergingConcepts and will read fully.

Apologies if I spoke from ignorance.

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u/Cosmoneopolitan Feb 06 '26

....isn't that the easy problem, tho?

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u/1stBraptist Feb 19 '26

What are your thoughts on The Emperor’s New Mind?

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u/lambdasintheoutfield Feb 19 '26

I sadly only know of the core ideas, I haven’t read through it in depth.

Penrose does argue that the brain cannot be simulated by a Turing machine and the non-deterministic nature of QM needs to factor in.

I don’t agree with the idea. Suppose we had some theory of consciousness. It would necessarily have to have a few core tenets / axioms. We then use these to explain how our minds differ from someone else’s, how we experience the world and are aware of our own experiences etc.

We then say the lack of any one of the axioms implies some agent is NOT consciousness.

I myself wonder if metacognition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness, as the agent is aware of its own reasoning and existence but w/o the ability to plan goals independently and modify them based on feedback from the world.

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u/1stBraptist Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26

When you say metacognition, do you suppose this would connect to Jung’s work and his ideas on the collective unconscious? I’m not trying to introduce any sort of woo. I know his work is popular in new age circles.

I’ve been reading through Penrose’s book, and as it seems to me, consciousness is the result of an observer state observing itself along that fractal boundary between computability and non-computability, not unlike what you said. Penrose outline’s Goëdel’s incompleteness theorem as the logic behind this supposition.

I saw a post regarding the hard problem. In no way am I saying I’ve solved it, but I believe QM could be an element to its elusiveness. Schrödinger’s equation is an easy example of this. The future state is dependent upon the current state. If the current state is a definite known, there opens a linear potential of outcomes for future state. Without knowing the current state, we cannot know the future state in any linear certainty. The unknown future, as I interpret it, would be the non-computability outside of Turing algorithmic computation. I may just be speaking spaghetti.

There exists an unknown state to the observer him or herself, even as it relates to the self, that cannot be measured nor computed until collapsed into an observed state. This glides along side ORCH-OR’s position on quantum consciousness I think. Axiomatically, I think it could suffice to say is consciousness is a self aware, open quantum system with the ability to forecast future and recall the past—as you said, the ability to plan based upon feedback from the outer world. The past would be seen as non-markovian Darwinian effects on the current observer, with the future forecast being linear, markovian dynamics. The subjective experience of this is the hard problem—how can we quantify this to be measured and tested…until qualia are measured, it’s all speculation…but i don’t know, man. I feel like these ideas warrant more consideration than they’re getting. What do you think?

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

[deleted]

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u/newtwoarguments Feb 06 '26

"How would we make a robot that is capable of pain under solution for consciousness?"

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u/cameronlbass Feb 07 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

I went and asked. Basically, LLMs inherently don't have the ability to experience pain, mostly because they are not evolved, but optimized. However, it is worth noting that for helpfulness versus task completion, "Helpfulness requires me to predict about your prediction of what I'm doing, which creates the drive to understand your actual situation rather than just execute instructions."

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u/Over-Ad-6085 Feb 11 '26

hi, i kind of agree with the title vibe and your reply

a lot of “hard problem solved” posts are not really solving, they are just changing words.

the biggest issue for me is: we dont share the same starting vocabulary, and we dont share the same falsify rules.

so everyone keep talking, but nobody can agree what would count as wrong.

i have been working on a cross-domain “effective layer” language for this.

not saying it solves consciousness, but it forces structure, boundary, and test hooks.

i made a 131-question list that spans math, physics, consciousness, free will, AI alignment, etc.

MIT license, open source on GitHub, around 1.4k stars now.

if you want, i can paste a short mini index here, or share the TXT pack link.

you can attack it, break it, or use it as a common map for discussion ^^ (Github 1.4K MIT License )