A Backdoor Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Western biases and the pantheistic reframing of the mystery of subjectivity

Image by Daniel R from Pixabay

There could be a backdoor solution to one of the greatest mysteries, the nature of consciousness. Instead of reaching directly for explanations in cognitive science, religion, or any other field, we should reflect on why the problem seems to us unsolvable.

Why is consciousness such an unfathomable enigma? Why do scientific explanations about how the brain works or how we evolved seem inadequate? Why does it seem like being a conscious agent is the strangest thing in the universe, as though we were trespassing in the natural order of insensate objects?

In a 1995 paper, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,” the philosopher David Chalmers distinguished between “easy” and “hard” problems of consciousness. The former ones, he said, “are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.”

Indeed, says Chalmers, “The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a…