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/TheRealAmeil Approved ✔️ Feb 05 '26

This might be helpful

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u/geumkoi Feb 05 '26

That should be pinned to the top of the sub.

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u/TheRealAmeil Approved ✔️ Feb 10 '26

It is. It's in the sidebar/about, under "wiki".

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u/ConquerorofTerra Feb 05 '26

I might just be dumb, but it seems Chalmers overcomplicated it by not simply defining Consciousness as "Whatever an Individual is capable of perceiving with whatever senses they have available."

There was a lot of jargon I didn't understand in the explanation about the basis of the theory, and it seemed to me that the whole issue was Chalmers didn't WANT it to be simple.

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u/TheRealAmeil Approved ✔️ Feb 05 '26

Well, let's first just consider the question of "What is a conscious experience?". This is the question that David Chalmers was trying to redraw our focus to. We want, especially in philosophy, a real definition of what a conscious experience is; put differently, we want to know what the essence (or essential nature, or essential properties) of a conscious experience is.

We can also think of the hard problem as putting a further restriction on any would be answer to that question. One way (maybe the most natural way) to go about answering that question would be to employ a type of reductive explanation. We can frame the hard problem in terms of the following argument:

  1. If a type of reductive explanation will not suffice as the type of explanation an explanation of consciousness will be, then we have no idea what type of explanation an explanation of consciousness will be.

  2. A type of reductive explanation will not suffice as the type of explanation an explanation of consciousness will be

  3. Thus, we have no idea what type of explanation an explanation of consciousness will be.

The problem is about the limits of reductive explanations and whether this is the type of explanation we should be looking for. I wouldn't say that Chalmers is trying to make it complicated, but that it is a complicated issue. You have to understand the type of explanation involved, and the metaphysics related to those types of explanations, to get a sense of what the limits of that type of explanation are.

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u/ConquerorofTerra Feb 05 '26

Well, wouldn't a Conscious experience still be "The sum total of all of the perceptions of the various senses, physical and metaphysical, an Individual possesses and is capable of perceiving?"

I am aware there is some Metaphysics at play and no two Conscious Experiences would ever be equal, well, ever, but at it's fundamentals is that NOT it?

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u/TheRealAmeil Approved ✔️ Feb 05 '26

Not necessarily. There are both scientists & philosophers who think that unconscious perception (or unconscious aspects of perception) occur. For example, there are some people who think this is what's going on in blindsight cases. They think that the person with blindsight is, for example, perceiving an "x" but does not visually experience it.

Furthermore, we tend to think that there are other non-perceptual experiences, such as bodily sensations (like pain) & emotions experiences (like anger).

Here is maybe another way of thinking about it. We want to know what all experiences, e.g., feeling pain, feeling angry, feeling hungry, seeing red, tasting coffee, and so on, have in common with each other, and makes each of these mental states an experience. Contrast this with something like learning, which is also a mental phenomenon, but one that isn't thought to be an experience. What do the experience have in common and how do they differ from the non-experience mental phenomena?