The (Not-So-Terribly-)Hard Problems: Gravity and Consciousness

Why you should never listen to philosophers who tell you a scientific challenge is impossible

Tis inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should affect other matter without mutual contact… That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. .Isaac Newton, 1692

This brief essay clears away any lingering misconceptions about one of the most pernicious and dogged distractions to ever trouble the study of Mind. Namely, the ill-titled “Hard Problem.” Indeed, consider this essay a dismissal of any “Hard Problems” rooted upon philosophical rumination rather than physical investigation.

If you are a student of the mind, and consciousness in particular, and have not heard of the Hard Problem, please read no further. There’s no need to understand the shortcomings of Freud to fathom contemporary neuroscience. There’s no need to understand the deficiencies of phrenology to fathom the modern science of personality. You are free, pilgrim, and should maintain your liberty.

The Hard Problem originated in the mind of a philosopher. A philosopher who knew little of physical science and nothing of mathematics. This philosopher proclaimed that he did not need to know anything about the details of the brain or the dynamics of human cogitation to penetrate the great mystery of consciousness. He could tackle the enigma of experience using logic alone.

The philosopher observed, as many pilgrims have, that there was a subjective, first-person quality to his experience of reality. The seemingly disembodied human awareness that “I am thinking! Me, here, now!” Yet, this private subjective experience seems to be utterly disconnected from objective public reality. In essence, the philosopher asked, How can tangible molecules, blood, and neurons produce intangible feelings, thoughts, and meaning?

Over the centuries, a great many humans have made the same observation. In fact, it’s reasonable to conclude that anyone who carefully contemplates their own river of thought will form similar observation: my mind seems a separate thing from my body.

Most humans who arrive at this dizzying revelation conclude that humans must therefore possess an immaterial soul.

At bottom, the Hard Problem is merely a faith-based proclamation of the reality of the immortal soul dressed up in academic jargon. An evidence-free, math-free, reason-free declaration that consciousness does not bow to physical law.

Consciousness is certainly not the first mystery so daunting that humans were moved to declare it a Hard Problem—a special category of problem for which spiritual explanations supersede scientific ones. The history of science is replete with them. It’s just that once the Hard Problems get solved, those sheepish philosophers and scientists who once hailed the problems’ mystical nature slink back into the shadows of history.

To get a clearer sense of the deeply unscientific, passive-aggressive, and cowardly nature of the Hard Problem of consciousness, let’s consider the very first Hard Problem in the history of science:

Gravity.

The epigraph at the top of this essay is a claim about the Hard Problem of gravity penned by the man who wrestled gravity down from the heavens onto the mortal plane, Dr. Isaac Newton. In his era, all pilgrims were stumped by the seemingly impossible and illogical mystery of gravity:

How can two objects that never touch and which exchange no observable signals or information possibly influence one another?

It’s magic, true magic! It’s outside the realm of human understanding! It’s a Very Hard Problem! God must be involved in such a Hard Problem, was the conclusion of Newton and his contemporaries. Echoing future advocates of the Hard Problem of consciousness, Newton proclaimed that he had solved the “Easy Problem” of gravity: coming up with an equation that accurately predicted gravity’s action. But the Hard Problem remained: what was this mystical force we called gravity? How could it beam out from one object and grab hold of another?

The whole point of science, of course, is to solve difficult problems through hands-on investigation of our physical reality. Attempting to solve problems through logic riddles and intense conversation is the realm of philosophy, not science. And indeed, it was no philosopher who solved the Hard Problem of gravity. It was a man who immersed himself deeply in the sticky thick mud of the material world: Albert Einstein.

How did Einstein solve the Hard Problem of gravity? By moving to a higher perspective. By adopting a more sophisticated stance toward the Problem, a stance rooted in inspired math and complex physical dynamics. By challenging the human-biased assumptions behind the formulation of the Hard Problem.

It turned out that the natural and logical conviction that gravity was an invisible force was wrong. So was the natural and logical human conviction that space and time were irrelevant for understanding the nature of gravity. So was the natural and logical human conviction that an object’s size and mass were fixed, as well as the conviction that an object’s velocity was irrelevant to gravity. It turned out that the entire formulation of the Hard Problem of gravity, as first annunciated by Newton, was misguided and fallacious, warped by the fundamental human bias for thinking about reality in terms of stuff rather than activity.

Einstein solved the mystery of gravity by demonstrating that, counterintuitively, space itself had a dynamic structure, that space was curved, that time could be treated as another dimension of space, and that the structure of spacetime depended on the presence and motion of mass within spacetime. Sophisticated ideas. None of these ideas ever manifested in the mind of Newton or others who claimed gravity was a mystical Hard Problem.

As Einstein showed, it turned out that two objects were influencing each other through a direct physical mechanism—not divine breath, but by warping the shared fabric of spacetime binding them together.

Elevating the commonplace observation that “two objects seem to influence each other without touching” into an Existential Hard Problem was simply glorifying human ignorance: “My imagination is too impoverished to understand this, so it must be divine!”

The same applies to the Hard Problem of consciousness.

The consciousness Hard Problem is framed in the same manner as the gravity Hard Problem: instead of the mystery of how two apparently distinct objects can communicate without touching, it’s a mystery of how two apparently distinct states of being—subjective and objective—can be connected to one another.

Consciousness was solved in the same way that Einstein solved gravity: By moving to a higher perspective. By adopting a more sophisticated stance toward the Problem rooted in inspired math and complex physical dynamics. By challenging the human-biased assumptions behind the formulation of the Hard Problem.

To explain consciousness requires understanding that there are multiple levels of mental dynamics operating in the brains of conscious creatures—three levels of interdependent dynamics, to be precise. It requires understanding that there’s nothing special about consciousness from a mental, neural, or evolutionary perspective—it’s simply another adaptation, little different than our neural control of breathing or our ability to jump over a rock. It’s not even the pinnacle of mental evolution on Earth: several other mental adaptations have been built on top of consciousness, including music, language, and self-consciousness.

And here we find another detail of physical reality obscured by the naïve, anti-intellectual insistence on the validity of the Hard Problem: the empirical fact that consciousness and self-consciousness are distinct phenomena embodied within distinct physical dynamics. All Earthly vertebrates are conscious. Only humans (and likely our Homo ancestors) are biologically capable of self-consciousness. But only certain humans alive in the past half-millennium or so have achieved self-consciousness, a very, very new development on the third rock from the sun.

The biggest reason you don’t find many philosophers these days insisting gravity remains a Hard Problem is because scientist have made boatloads of new discoveries and technologies based upon Einstein’s explanation of gravity, including black holes and GPS.

Similarly, the physical explanation of consciousness (and self-consciousness) opens up new explanations of old mysteries, revealing answers to how pain works, how autism works, how language works, and why consciousness evolved at all: to manage attention and learning in a wildly complicated physical system with myriad parallel and hierarchical dynamics operating simultaneously.

What’s so offensive and stultifying about those who maintain allegiance to the Hard Problem of consciousness is the fact that Stephen Grossberg and Gail Carpenter first identified the physical dynamics embodying subjective experience in 1982, more than a decade before philosophers started pitching the Hard Problem. It’s as if Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity (ten years before his more comprehensive general theory of relativity) but subsequent philosophers continued to declare that the mystery of gravity was unsolved and unsolvable.

At the end of the day, “hard” and “easy” are highly personal and subjective terms. What’s easy for one person may be quite hard for another. For me, basketball is a Hard Problem. For LeBron James, it’s a Not-So-Hard Problem.

If you find a problem too hard to deal with, you shouldn’t go around issuing proclamations that the rest of the world should consider it hard, too. You might just convince some folks it is.