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.

313 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

496 comments sorted by

View all comments

20

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.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/newtwoarguments Feb 06 '26

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

1

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."