How to Solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Without your new affliction, don't need your new restrictions, Gimme that old time religion, it's good enough for me
Pack it up, everyone!
This random blogger with ZERO credentials just answered the hard problem of consciousness — like Captain Beefheart smashing his fingers on a piano and producing Trout Mask Replica.
Except I’ll cite my Drumbo sources as we go. And no, I’m not putting the answer behind a Substack paywall.
You’re welcome.
So let’s pull this thread.
First, what exactly is the hard problem of consciousness? It’s the question of how and why humans have subjective experience.
Why are the lights on?
Here’s my answer:
Step One: There Is No Mind
We don’t have a “mind.” We’re minding. Verbing our way through existence. The brain is just an organ.
There is no noun-self, no ghost in the machine. The mind isn’t the brain’s screensaver, a brick maze running forever on Windows 95.
Minding is behaviour, context, will. The brain is the pancreas with delusions of grandeur.
Minding is a verb because there is no static self. You’re not you in some fixed Platonic sense. You’re you-ing, moment to moment, unbroken and continuous.
Thought is jazz: not a signal from a command centre but a drum inside a bigger improvisation.
Consciousness isn’t a noun but a process. But hold on. If the brain produces thoughts — and we can’t always control them at will — doesn’t that mean “minding” is tied to brain function?
The brain isn’t as innocent as the liver.
Slice it open, zap it, or let disease rot it — thought, memory, will, and perception go haywire. Stroke Broca’s area and our “minding” verb disappears.
But this proves nothing. Just look at dogs.
Do Dogs Have Subjective Experience?
The brain enables minding, but it isn’t identical to it. Just like the heart pumps faster when you see your crush. Doesn’t mean “love” lives in the ventricle.
Neurology is a science. Neuroscience? Philosophical reductionism posing as scientific knowledge.
Minding is linguistic. Without language, there’s no self-narration, and no “mind” in a moral or behavioural sense.
So what about dogs?
Anyone who’s had one knows something’s going on behind the eyes. Barking, growling, sniffing — a kind of pre-linguistic proto-minding. A grammar of desire, fear, attention, affection.
The brain provides raw sensory and emotional data. Language spins that into stories. Minding is narrating those stories to oneself and others.
A dog has feeling, intention, intuition — but no narrative. They live moment to moment, unable to trade short-term gains for long-term well-being. They don’t contemplate birth and death.
A dog doesn’t think, “this is me thinking.”
A dog isn’t responsible the way a human is. We’re responsible for the stories we tell ourselves and others.
But does this solve the hard problem of consciousness? What makes dogs alive like us?
Precursor to the Solution
My solution to the hard problem of consciousness is fairly straightforward:
The brain and body produces stimuli — raw sense data, affective states, hormonal cues.
A proto-narrative emerges — causal patterns, anticipatory loops (“I did this, then this happened”).
Symbolic cognition evolves — a semiotic layer of gestures, sounds, mimicry.
Language develops — that symbolic layer becomes recursive self-narration: “I am.”
Minding emerges as an interpreted interface between body, world, and society.
From this we can conclude: everything is language-mediated, including the self. The “rule of law” is just formalized behavioural constraint.
Consciousness is a social construct stacked on biological preconditions and culturally evolved symbols. Feelings like love, shame, and identity live inside the stories we tell ourselves and others.
For more on how I got here, see Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop and The Meaning of Mind by Thomas Szasz. I’ve borrowed from both, then warped their ideas into my own bastardization.
But the hard problem still remains.
For David Chalmers, it isn’t about structure but qualia. Why does processing information feel like something from the inside?
He’d probably say I’ve wasted your time explaining how the story got built. I still haven’t explained why there’s an inner film at all. Why subjective experience instead of just behaviour?
If everything is narrative, then:
Why does heartbreak hurt?
Why is red red?
Why do I get goosebumps at the end of Tool’s ‘Lateralus’ when Maynard James Keenan belts “spiral out, keep going” over a polyrhythm worthy of Zappa?
We can call these narrative responses… but why? What is having them? Who or what is the feeling?
The hard problem isn’t about explaining the architecture of mind, society, or symbols of meaning. It’s about why this exact arrangement of meat and electricity produces awareness instead of unconscious reflex.
The thinkers I’ve read sidestep it. Julian Jaynes hides in bicameral hallucinations. Szasz reframes it in linguistic terms. But the question — why it’s like something to be alive — remains.
So the brain and body process data. So what.
Rudimentary narrative processes take shape. Proto-stories grow complex and into linguistic constructs. Out of that: mind, gods, society, the rule of law.
Everything is a social construct.
A neat explanation. But it still doesn’t tell us why the lights are on. It doesn’t crack the hard problem posed by Chalmers, Nagel, or McGinn.
Still, with this groundwork, the answers come into sharper view.
Answering the Hard Problem… Kinda
Some of you will call this a cop-out. But if you scrolled straight here, no harm done.
The hard problem is asking the wrong question. “Qualia” aren’t things — they’re linguistic hallucinations like everything else. There is no feel, only a narrative that includes the claim of feeling.
I lifted this mostly from Daniel Dennett.
Szasz would likely agree. To say you “feel” is itself a linguistic act. That’s minding. Dogs aren’t conscious. We’re anthropomorphizing them.
But it’s an uncomfortable answer. Deeply uncomfortable. The pain of losing a loved one? That’s not something you feel but something you perform.
There is no hard problem. We’re just telling ourselves a story.
I think I have a better solution.
Pneuma
Quick check-up: do you, dear reader, feel you have an inner life — or do you believe you do? What if I stripped away your language? Would there still be a “you”?
A universal self exists — non-linguistic, non-semiotic, directly experienced. Enlightenment. Zen.
The true self is the Tao.
We are all one. Not in a hippie way, but literally. Scratch the surface of cause-and-effect physics and it collapses into quantum entanglements that transcend time.
So why do our lives feel like more? More than just mind-space identity and social constructs? Because we spring from the same fountain.
The Tao is the non-symbolic ground of being. The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The “true self” isn’t a story, persona, or mind.
It’s the substrate. The formless flow beneath all names, thoughts, and recursive symbol play. The suchness that needs no interpretation.
It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.
And to emphasize: “we are all one” isn’t metaphor. Not hippie ideology. I’m not resurrecting John Lennon to “Imagine.”
I’m being literal.
Ontological identity. Quantum entanglement. Non-locality. The collapse of classical boundaries between observer and observed.
The particles composing your liver and in the pixels you’re reading were once part of the same star. The energy fields binding us are constantly shifting with everything else, all the time.
Beneath the linguistic ego there is no self or other. Only Tao. Reality is succession, not divisible into units.
Prefer French philosophy to Eastern religion? Take Henri Bergson: time and consciousness aren’t consequences of instants but a qualitative unfolding. A felt continuity. That’s the “why” of qualia.
What remains when you drop interpretation and simply exist? Duration is the Tao experienced.
Why do we feel? Because at the deepest level, there’s no “you” to feel — only feeling happening. The Tao making itself known. Through you, as you, for a moment.
It’s not something you generate. It’s something you are. We get lost in narratives, in minding.
But beneath it all is stillness. A flow. Unity.
Experience it yourself. Sit in silence. Dissolve into the raw stream of mindless, selfless Tao.
Discover who you were before you were told your name.
But… does that solve the hard problem?
I argue it might be the only thing that ever has. Not intellectual handwaving, but empiricism — as scientists should demand.
How to Solve the Hard Problem
The hard problem of consciousness: why does the brain produce subjective experience?
The felt harmony of a colour scheme? The ache of losing a loved one? The ecstasy of Danny Carey behind the kit?
Why isn’t the brain just a dark, silent meat-computer? Why are we aware at all? Why are the lights on?
Scientists probe the brain and shrug — or spin half-baked theories for more funding. Meanwhile, philosophers build arguments.
But the question can be answered through experience. Taoist and Zen traditions don’t explain consciousness — they dissolve the problem. And you can test this yourself.
To put it into words would undermine the point. So here’s the cop-out: the “hard problem” is the wrong question. Like a wave wondering why it’s wet.
Lao Tzu said, “The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.”
From this view:
Consciousness doesn’t emerge from matter.
Consciousness is the substrate — the field.
Brain activity is a local pattern in the unfolding.
The illusion of “you” arises from trying to explain what ultimately cannot be reduced.
You’re not a subject experiencing qualia. You are qualia, experienced.
Materialism won’t solve it. Panpsychism is too vague. Dualism creates more problems than it solves. Functionalism explains inputs and outputs, but not being.
You don’t solve the hard problem like a puzzle. You step outside the frame where it exists.
Taoism and Zen don’t explain why the lights are on. They show there was never a “you” to ask.
And that’s the ultimate empirical test. Science works in third-person data. The hard problem is a first-person riddle. The only test is direct experience.
Sit still. Drop the story. Stop naming things.
What’s left?
You don’t solve the hard problem. It solves you.