The hard problem of consciousness

Can materialism account for consciousness?

11 min readDec 22, 2021

Questions tackling consciousness have been central to philosophical discussions for centuries, not only because of the notoriously mysterious nature of consciousness but also because their answers can unravel more about existence itself.

Consciousness is best defined as our ability to be aware of ourselves and the world around us. It is this one undeniable feature of reality that is utterly invulnerable to all doubt.

It involves the unshareable and unique collection of our crazy thoughts, wild feelings, etched memories, passionate emotions, and unmediated experience of what it is like to be us.

I’m writing these few lines driven by this mind-blowing yet equally frightening and lonely realization of being the only one to know exactly what it is like to be me. No matter how much language evolves, no matter how fancy and poetic our words are, our descriptions of our experiences will always be fallible, vulnerable to misunderstandings, dependent on the desperate hope that others will accurately attach the same meaning to words as us.

Contemporary theories of the mind still grapple with questions that have to do with the source of consciousness and attempt to give an explanatory account for the intrinsic presence of this vivid and subjective experience perceived by each one of us. This takes us to a famous problem framed and articulated by philosopher David Chalmers: the hard problem of consciousness.

The hard problem of consciousness articulates the sense of having more to consciousness than physical processes. It refers to the unbridgeable gap between the non-sentient matter of the brain and consciousness that is intangible and categorically unlike anything else that we perceive in the physical world. It is a “hard problem” for materialism (also used interchangeably with physicalism in this context) which is a philosophical commitment that holds that all phenomena in the world, including consciousness and mental states, are ultimately reducible to the behavior of matter.

Materialists still have that very eurocentric, eighteenth-century post-catholic attitude. They dismiss the smallest possibility of the existence of nonphysical explanations no matter how silly and “abracadabrantesque” their materialist explanations get; arguing that matter is the only “sober” and hard-nosed explanation and that suggesting otherwise means sliding into some medieval dark ages of unscientific idiocies.

I find this particularly interesting because materialists have a reputation of jumping down theists’ throats at the slightest mention of God, accusing them of being dogmatic blind faith followers, unconscious of their own “deities”, biases and partisanship.

The truth is that every empirical scientist presupposes a philosophical and metaphysical framework whether they acknowledge it or not. And when it comes to consciousness, neurobiology for example which aims to understand consciousness through the properties of neurons is, ipso facto, predicated on materialism. Thus, any empirical theory or interpretation that results from it, is based on the unproven premise of materialism.

As the neuroscientist and philosopher of mind, Antti Revonsuo wrote in his book Consciousness: the science of subjectivity: “it is useful also for empirical scientists to be aware of the different philosophical alternatives because every empirical theory also necessarily involves some sort of implicit philosophical commitments. The over-empirical approach that a scientist takes to consciousness is guided by his prior philosophical commitments or intuitions about the nature of science and the nature of consciousness whether he is aware of such commitments or not.”

Neuroscience can indeed deal with what David Chalmers distinguished as “the easy problem of consciousness”, which engages with questions about the brain’s mechanisms, awakeness and sleep, the ability to discriminate and categorize stimuli, behaviors, the structure of the brain, its dynamics, and in a general way the functions of consciousness. These are problems that can eventually be explained with the objective, third-person methods of cognitive science yet solving them does not solve the hard problem of “phenomenal” consciousness or what we call “qualia”.

The hard problem of consciousness can be formulated in these two key questions:

1- What is it like for a particular conscious entity or organism to have a subjective inner experience?

Subjective first-person experience is not something that we can know or understand via brain states only. There is something about it that cannot be known even if we get to have the minutiae of one’s brain states.

No one can ever know what it is like for me to look at the sea waves at sunset for example or what it is exactly for me to look at this beautiful red rose even if they know everything about my brain.

Neuroscience is the science of correlation. It is interested in giving us a third-person objective analysis, it can point out the exact neurons that allow me to see this color, for example, it can explain the law of reflection, how my eyes receive the light and send signals to the brain, how the brain interprets the image and all that; but no amount of collected data or mapped out brain states can make you know what is it like for me to experience the color red. All that data doesn’t suffice for someone who has been blind since birth, for example, to know the experience of the color red because there is no property in the object that allows us to experience the object.

Even if I use words that we both understand to describe it, you will not be able to have the same experience as me because we still can experience the same words differently. If I say the word “bitter” for example, your understanding of it can be slightly, or very different than mine.

Understanding the neurochemical activity that correlates to pain is still not sufficient to know what it is like for a particular person to be in pain. The brain states are not causative for the conscious states. A good example of that is Thomas Huxley’s analogy about how Aladdin rubbing his lamp is correlated to yet unaccountable for the appearance of the genie.

In his article, “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel argues that there are facts about the conscious experience that are subjective and cannot be known from a third-person perspective. Even if we know all the objective facts about bats, we will not know what it would really be like to be a bat. We might be able to imagine what it would be like to hang upside down, to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects; to have very poor vision, and to perceive the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; but even this remarkably flexible, wild even, imagination would not allow us, Nagel argues, to know what a bat’s experience is really like.

He said in his paper: “In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.”

In his book “an atheist guide to reality”, Alex Rosenberg argues that neurons cannot account for “intentionality” because they cannot be “about” themselves or “about” anything outside of themselves. He explains that “intentionality” as a feature of consciousness cannot be an intrinsic property of physical objects.

He gives an example of two images, one of the neurons that fire when someone thinks of Paris and the other is an actual image of Paris.

He explains that the image of the neurons above cannot allow us to understand that those neurons are intrinsically about Paris. He says: “there is nothing in the whole universe including of course the neurons in your brain that just by its nature of composition can do this job of being about some other clump of matter.”

2- How do the seemingly blind (not directed by intentional forces) and cold (not aware of themselves or anything outside of themselves) physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind?

This question raises an issue for those who are committed to the idea that everything is explicable exhaustively by and reducible to physics and chemistry. Materialists cannot appeal to physics to ground consciousness because its ontological features cannot be denied, reduced to, or paraphrased in favor of physical complexity. In a purely physicalist paradigm, there is no explanation framed in exclusively physical terms as to how the set of processes we call “mind” can emerge from the activity of the organ we call the “brain”.

The difference between the molecules that constitute the brain and a table is insignificant in a physicalist worldview as both share some fundamental aspects of physicality. The question however is what makes the matter that constitutes the brain special in a way that it can give rise to consciousness but not the table? In other words, why is it that only humans (and animals) are conscious in the way they are?

It is worth mentioning that the hard problem of consciousness doesn’t undermine or deny the dynamic interplay between consciousness and the physical brain in any shape or form; an analogy that I find very interesting is the driver and the car, the interdependence between them doesn’t mean that they are identical.

The major sub-theories of materialism:

To address the previous questions, many materialist approaches have been developed.

**1- Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism):**

Eliminativism is the absurd and radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that everything we experience iternally does not actually exist.

This position has been discarded because it is nonsensical and self-refuting. Eliminative materialism eliminates the mental states, ipso facto, it undermines our very thoughts, ideas, reason, and the truth-bearing faculties of the mind. It argues that the mind and ideas do not exist, which is a self-defeating proposition.

Faced with the questions explained above, eliminativists just sweep the problem under the carpet and go this far as to deny the existence of our reason, emotions, perceptions, and the first-person experiences that we all undergo.

2- Reductive materialism:

Motivated by the success of science, the supporters of this sub-theory of materialism do not deny consciousness but argue that it can be reduced to the physical ‘movements’ of the brain in some way. The issue however is that the activation of certain brain areas and the firing of neurons are completely different from sensations, feelings, emotions, and experiences. As “optimistic” as it may sound, this position still does not deal with the hard problem of consciousness and doesn’t offer anything substantial.

3- Emergent materialism:

It holds that mental properties emerge as new properties of complex material systems that have complex causal relations.

First of all, we can sense that this approach assumes reductive materialism to be true, which needs to first be proven. This “theory” is “anecdotal’’ at best because it has no logical or consistent chaining of causes and effects. It is more like supernatural “woo-woo” where we have to take this unjustified qualitative leap from physical processes to something that is so qualitatively unlike what we see in the observable world.

To back their position up, the supporters of this approach usually give the example of how Hydrogen reacts with Oxygen to give a new property of wetness arguing that this can be the case with consciousness too. This is a bad example because the properties of water can still be explained with physical terms and can be found in the properties of Hydrogen and Oxygen, whereas the properties of consciousness cannot be found in the physical processes that are causally related and connected.

As philosopher David Papineau said: “We remain puzzled about why the brain states give rise to the feelings, in a way that we don’t feel puzzled about why NaCl gives rise to salt or electrical discharges to lightning.”

There are other materialist approaches like functionalism, behaviorism, epiphenomenalism… but none of them presents a “good” solution to the problem.

Other radical attempts have been made to explain this problem of qualia, by moving away from this completely reductionist, brain-based theories. An example of that is panpsychism, which is the idea that consciousness is universal.

Panpsychism suggests that the physical world has both physical and nonphysical properties and that everything (humans, animals, microbes, even photons) has some kind of proto-consciousness.

This “theory” has many objections, first because it is counterintuitive. The idea that tables, chairs, electrons, and photons have some kind of consciousness is very strange. Another objection has to do with the abstract, metaphysical, and unscientific nature of this claim.

Thomas Nagel said about panpsychism “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory.”

The claims pushed by panpsychism clash fundamentally with the standard naturalistic and empirical approach of science. If materialists are ready to make this radical scientific paradigm shift to include this “supernatural” interpretation, the distinction between materialism and supernaturalism is no longer meaningful. They cannot selectively stop it here one would argue, they should include other forms of nonphysical explanations as well.

The hardest problem that faces panpsychism however is what is known as the combination problem. As stated generally, the combination problem is the problem of how the micro-level conscious entities combine to give rise to more sophisticated minds with unified conscious experience, like ours.

To put it all together…

The hard problem of consciousness is an in-principle problem that is not due to a lack of information or limitations of tools and cannot be surmounted with future scientific progress. Our inner subjective experiences cannot be put in a test tube or under a microscope, so the materialistic understanding of science is simply unequipped to explain them.

Materialism is an unintelligible position to approach questions that have to do with the subtle, profound, and nonphysical nature of the qualia. What we need rather is to expand the limits of our conceptualization of reality and to move away from the physicalistic worldview.