The Hard Problem of Consciousness — David Chalmers's designation for the explanatory gap between physical neural processes and the subjective, felt quality of experience — occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus. The term crystallizes a question that neuroscientists, phenomenologists, and analytic philosophers alike find irreducible: why does any physical process give rise to something it is like to undergo it? Evan Thompson engages the problem most rigorously, reformulating it in phenomenological and enactive terms, substituting 'body' for 'physical' and arguing that the dualistic separation of life and mind makes sentience inexplicable. Antonio Damasio approaches the problem indirectly, treating feelings as the primitive stratum of consciousness and the qualia problem as inseparable from the biology of self. Iain McGilchrist mounts the most uncompromising resistance to reductionist dissolution, insisting that consciousness is irreducibly fundamental and that attempts to explain it away through molecular biology or eliminativism constitute category mistakes. Kandel situates the problem in the unbridgeable gap between neural electrical activity and subjective meaning. Thompson's parallel case of historical vitalism — that vitalists too faced a hard problem about life — functions as a diagnostic lens for understanding why the concepts currently in play may be insufficient. The corpus reveals no consensus solution, only a shared recognition that the standard scientific toolkit, designed for third-person description, is constitutively inadequate to first-person phenomenal fact.
In the library
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The problem of what it is for mental processes to be also bodily processes is thus in large part the problem of what it is for subjectivity and feeling to be a bodily phenomenon. In this formulation of the hard problem, I have substituted the term body for physical.
Thompson reformulates the Hard Problem by replacing 'physical' with 'body,' arguing that grounding the explanatory gap in living embodiment rather than Cartesian matter opens a richer phenomenological path toward understanding subjectivity.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
This problem is a version of what is now known as the 'hard problem of consciousness' (Chalmers 1996; Nagel 1974). During the heyday of cognitivism in the 1970s and early 1980s, cognitivists liked to proclaim that their view was 'the only game in town.'
Thompson identifies the Hard Problem as the mind-mind problem generated when cognitivism solved computational questions while creating an unbridged explanatory gap between computational states and experience.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Some vitalists did indeed encounter a hard problem about life. Like those philosophers who think it conceivable that a physical duplicate of a conscious being could lack consciousness altogether, these vitalists thought it conceivable that organized, moving bodies, functionally indistinguishable from organisms, could lack 'vitality.'
Thompson historicizes the Hard Problem by showing that vitalism faced a structurally analogous explanatory gap about life, suggesting that the apparent intractability of the consciousness problem may reflect inadequate concepts rather than a permanent metaphysical barrier.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
McGilchrist, citing Schrödinger, argues that the Hard Problem is irresolvable by reduction because consciousness is the foundational datum of all experience, prior to and more certain than any physical description.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
McGilchrist endorses the position that consciousness is irreducible, making the Hard Problem not a solvable puzzle but a disclosure of the primacy of experience over physical description.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Searching for a 'molecular' explanation of consciousness is a waste of time, since the physiological processes responsible for this wholly private experience will be seen to degenerate into seemingly quite ordinary, workaday reactions.
McGilchrist marshals Gunther Stent's argument that molecular reductionism commits a category mistake when applied to consciousness, and concludes with Ramachandran and Blakemore that consciousness may be an irreducible property of the universe.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
Searching for a 'molecular' explanation of consciousness is a waste of time, since the physiological processes responsible for this wholly private experience will be seen to degenerate into seemingly quite ordinary, workaday reactions.
McGilchrist argues that reductionist approaches to the Hard Problem mistake a category boundary, and that consciousness, like gravity, may be a primitive feature of reality admitting no deeper explanation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The term 'hard problem' was introduced to a large public by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind and is the latest designation for the old qualia problem.
Damasio situates the Hard Problem within the longer history of the qualia problem, acknowledging Chalmers's coinage while locating its deeper genealogy in earlier philosophical treatments of subjective experience.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
What we do not understand is how electrical activity in neurons gives rise to the meaning we ascribe to that color or that wavelength of sound.
Kandel articulates the Hard Problem as the gap between neural electrical activity and the subjective meaning persons assign to sensory qualia, acknowledging it as a fundamental unsolved question in neuroscience.
Kandel, Eric R., In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
How to account for the emergence and presence of sentience in the natural world is one of the outstanding problems of the sciences of mind today. The dualistic separation of consciousness and life makes it impossible to understand consciousness in its basic form of bodily sentience.
Thompson frames the Hard Problem in enactive terms, arguing that dualism between consciousness and biological life prevents any adequate account of sentience and that a deep continuity of life and mind is needed.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious.
McGilchrist, citing Fodor, documents the philosophical consensus that the Hard Problem remains genuinely intractable, presenting it as evidence that consciousness resists any straightforward material explanation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
How can we make sense of the idea of a completely unconscious being, a being with no experience whatsoever of its own body, whose (functionally defined) perceptual abilities are exactly those of its (physically identical) conscious counterpart?
Thompson challenges the philosophical conceivability of zombies by arguing that bodily experience is constitutive of perceptual function, thereby mounting a phenomenological critique of a key thought experiment that props up the Hard Problem.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
We still have the qualia or felt texture of life and the inner subjective experience of being aware, which are not outwardly measureable.
Siegel acknowledges the Hard Problem in clinical-developmental terms, noting that qualia and subjective awareness resist quantitative measurement and therefore exceed the standard empirical toolkit of mind science.
Siegel, Daniel J., The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020supporting
By making feelings be the primitives of consciousness, we are obliged to inquire about the intimate nature of feeling. What are feelings made of? These questions are not entirely answerable at the moment. They define the edge of our current scientific reach.
Damasio proposes that identifying feelings as the primitives of consciousness reframes but does not dissolve the Hard Problem, pushing the explanatory gap to the boundary of current scientific reach.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
When feelings, which describe the inner state of life now, are 'placed' or even 'located' within the current perspective of the whole organism, subjectivity emerges.
Damasio traces the emergence of subjectivity from valenced feelings situated within an organismic perspective, offering a naturalistic account of how the Hard Problem's central datum — subjective experience — arises from biological processes.
Damasio, Antonio R., The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
I also believe internalism is a mistake, and that consciousness is located not inside us, but in a non-spatial 'betweenness' created by our attention and the object.
McGilchrist dissolves part of the Hard Problem by rejecting internalism entirely, arguing that consciousness is not an inner neural product but a relational phenomenon occurring in the space between subject and world.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
I also believe internalism is a mistake, and that consciousness is located not inside us, but in a non-spatial 'betweenness' created by our attention and the object.
McGilchrist argues that the Hard Problem is partly a product of mislocating consciousness inside the skull, and proposes instead a relational, non-spatial account of conscious experience.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021aside
Varela, F. J. 1996. Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Gallagher's bibliography records Varela's neurophenomenological program as an explicit methodological response to the Hard Problem, linking first-person phenomenological method to empirical neuroscience.
Gallagher, Shaun, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside
I regard the thought of solving the consciousness problem with some skepticism. I simply hope that the ideas presented here help with the eventual elucidation of the problem of self from a biological perspective.
Damasio expresses principled epistemic humility about resolving the Hard Problem, framing his project as contributing to the biological elucidation of self rather than claiming a full solution.
Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999aside