The Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

A mechanical explanation of why OBJECTIVE BRAIN ACTIVITY feels like MY SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE.

[ This is an initial draft; a more detailed and polished version coming soon… ]

I could no longer doubt the mathematical consistency and coherence of the kind of quantum mechanics to which my calculations pointed. At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of the atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me. I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea. 
   .Werner Heisenberg, upon becoming the first human to work out the core math of quantum physics, opening a discombobulating new world of science.

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Hard Problem Prime:

How does objective physical activity in my brain feel like my own private subjective experience?

More precisely,

How does all the ACTIVITY buzzing around my brain get united into MY seamless conscious EXPERIENCE?

We need three pieces of conceptual machinery to elucidate a mechanical account of how biological activity in your brain is experienced as your experience.

The explanation is mechanical in the sense that we can trace out a continuous, unbroken physical and causal explanation of everything that happens in your (“objective”) BRAIN and in your (“subjective”) EXPERIENCE from the moment a visual stimulus impinges upon your retina to you becoming aware of a visual experience.

It is mathematical in that all mental activity and all mechanical causality are governed by math.

The mental activity and math are largely drawn from Stephen Grossberg’s masterwork Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain. However, even though Grossberg successfully and gloriously mathematized most mental dynamics in the human brain (including the dynamics of consciousness), he never really understood the Hard Problems or what a solution might look like.

That’s certainly no mark against him. It’s a mark against the purveyors of Hard Problems.

Keep in mind—Steve had identified the biological basis of consciousness in the mid-1970s (resonance)¹, then (with Gail Carpenter) published a complete mathematical model of the biological basis of consciousness in 1987². Seven years after that, in 1994, David Chalmers proclaimed that science would never figure out consciousness because it was a hard problem.³

By that point, Steve had been systematically mathematizing the brain for thirty-seven years in an ever-expanding integrated model of mental dynamics—when along came philosophers without any science or math background, unable to follow Steve’s work—who pompously and cluelessly declared that whatever Steve might be doing, it’s not the real science of consciousness.

It’s exactly as if Einstein published his 1916 paper “The Foundation of General Theory of Relativity” and philosophers came along and said that whatever else Albert might be doing, it’s not the real science of gravity—after all, Einstein doesn’t address the Hard Problem of gravity: explaining how there is an invisible force!

That’s the point: Steve had identified the core biological dynamics of conscious experience and worked out the math governing their dynamics. In the 1990s he already had a mechanical sense of what qualia were doing functionally, which he fully elaborated in his 2017 master paper on consciousness.⁴ For him, there was nothing more that needed explaining about qualia. From his perspective, if you had any question about conscious experience, he could answer it biologically and mathematically.

And in truth, the Hard Problem of Consciousness turned into a major distraction, moving science away from biological research on consciousness by claiming that real research was impossible even in principle and lionizing mathless academics. At the exact moment science had finally broken through the great mystery and nailed down the material basis of experience, philosophers like Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers landed book deals that gave them a national platform to shape the academic and public understanding of consciousness in a very different and unscientific direction than Grossberg’s work.⁵ An understanding rooted in metaphysics rather than math and mechanics.

The Hard Problem takes a challenging engineering problem (What design principles, dynamics, and structures support experience?) and reframes it as a ridiculous philosophical problem (how can physical activity have a feeling? It’s metaphysically impossible!)

Consider Einstein’s general relativity. His theory describes complex physical dynamics (namely, the dynamics of space, time, matter, and energy) governed by mathematical equations and mechanical principles. Grossberg offers the same: complex physical dynamics (namely, the dynamics of purpose, perception, meaning, communication, and intentional behavior) governed by mathematical equations and mechanical principles.

But to solve the Hard Problem of gravitation, one needs an extra step beyond Einstein’s work. The Hard Problem asked, How can there be an invisible force that reaches out from one object to grab another?

General relativity retorted, There is no force!

But we still needed an explanation for why there seems to be a force even though there is no force.

The explanation: it looks like massive objects attract other objects—when you release an apple, it plunges to the ground. This appears to be an invisible force, because something unseen sure seems to grab the apple and haul it down.

But Einstein showed that’s not what’s happening, mechanically. Instead, every object in the universe wants to continue moving straight ahead. But space is curved. The precise curvature of a section of space depends on the mass it holds. Massive objects bend space around them. The more massive an object, the more space is curved around the object.

But when space is curved, objects moving through space move along the curves. The curves of space are invisible to our direct perception, but we can infer the invisible curves by following the trajectory of objects through space, like the moon orbiting the Earth—or an apple falling to the Earth.

The Earth doesn’t “grab” the moon with an invisible force. The Earth is so massive it warps the spacetime near its surface such that any object close to the Earth will naturally move along the Earth-induced curvature in an orbit around the Earth, creating the human illusion of an invisible force tugging the moon around.

This article offers a similar Consciousness-Hard-Problem-dismissing explanation that draws upon Grossberg’s engineering account of consciousness, but adds new insights and perspectives you won’t find in Grossberg’s work. Grossberg’s mechanics and math explain how consciousness works, the same way Einstein’s mechanics and math explain how gravity works. But to do away with Hard Problem Prime requires us to go further and explain why it seems to David Chalmers and most other folks that brain activity “GETS CONVERTED” into experience.

There is no conversion from activity to experience.

The activity is the experience.

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To do away with Hard Problem Prime, we need three pieces of conceptual machinery.

First, clarity on the mechanical nature of PERSPECTIVE. (Detailed in the first article in this series.)

A perspective consists of two mechanical facts:

• WHERE YOU ARE STANDING.

• WHERE YOU ARE LOOKING.

If you are a spectator watching a basketball game from the stands, you enjoy third-person perspective on all game activity.

If you are a player in a basketball game, you enjoy first-person perspective on all game activity. You are part of game activity, because you are creating game activity in response to game activity you experience directly.

Similarly, if you are a thinking agent in a brain—such as a neuron, neural circuit, or module—you enjoy first-person perspective on all brain activity, because you are creating brain activity in response to brain activity that you experience directly.

If you are a spectator watching someone else’s brain activity, you enjoy third-person perspective on that activity.

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Second, we need an understanding of how all activity can generate a mechanical feeling. The precise feeling of an activity is determined by the purpose of the experiencing activity, as described in the third article in this series.

The first-person mechanical feeling of jump shot activity, for instance, is given by the physical trajectory of the blocking activity that attempts to block the jump shot. At every moment, the blocking activity mechanically unfolds in response to its instant-by-instant interactions with the shooting activity.

Calculus tells us that at any given instant (technically, at any duration of arbitrarily small size), an activity has specific and quantifiable physical properties (such as position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, force). These physical properties of a target activity contribute to the experiencing activity’s experience of the target activity.

Every molecular, neural, or modular activity interacting with other molecular, neural, or modular activity will experience the target activity from a first-person perspective given mechanically by the unfolding of the experiencing activity.

But how do all of these activity-to-activity interactions—all these first-person perspectives of 80 billion neurons interacting with each other in your cranium, all the first-person perspectives of dozens of modules interacting with each other—how does this gargantuan number of real-time interactions get “instantly” amalgamated into a unified conscious state experienced as YOUR seamless experience?

We need the third and final piece of conceptual machinery to crack this puzzle.

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The real mystery of Hard Problem Prime has always been,

What FORCE or DYNAMIC binds together this wild profusion of molecular, neural, and modular interactions in my brain into a single “mental performance” for one exclusive spectator: ME?

The answer, in a word, is purpose.

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Let’s revisit the basketball game.

The basketball game should be the “animal model” for consciousness research, the way the fruitfly is for genetic research and the zebrafish is for developmental research. Here on the Dark Gift, I’ve used mechanical insights from basketball dynamics to explain consciousness, self-consciousness, language, and now the hard problems of consciousness.

The reason the basketball game is such a useful model for thinking about consciousness is because it makes it easier to visualize and develop intuition regarding first-person vs third-person perspectives, and to visualize and develop intuition regarding purposeful activities interacting with other purposeful activities.

Let’s pose the same question about basketball games that we ask about consciousness:

How does all the player activity on the court—all the jump shots, all the steals, all the slam dunks, all the fast breaks—how does all this player activity come together to form a seamless unified GAME?

Unriddling how all the neural activity in your brain gets united seamlessly into your consciousness is the same mechanical puzzle as understanding how all the player activity on the court gets effortlessly and seamlessly united into a basketball game.

So then. Why do you effortlessly and seamlessly experience all player activity on a basketball court as part of the same game?

Even if you’ve never seen a basketball game before, you instinctively recognize that when a courtside fan throws a cup onto the floor, that’s not part of the game. If a bird flies over the court and poops in the basket, you know that’s not part of the game. If the roof of the arena starts leaking and water drips onto the court, that’s not part of the game. Why not?

Because the activity of the cup and the bird pursue different purposes than game activity, while the dripping rainwater pursues no purpose at all.

Nobody has to explain to us the cup, bird, and drips are not game activity. They are easily distinguished as irrelevant to the game because the game activity ignores them completely. The players don’t adjust their activity to incorporate the cup into their offensive action. The players don’t hurl the basketball at the bird. The referees might halt game activity in response to these events—but that makes it even more clear the intrusive activities are non-game activities.

Activity which does not pursue the same purpose as game activity is easily distinguished as non-game activity, even by naive viewers.

Why don’t philosophers pose a Hard Problem of basketball? Why don’t we feel stricken with a metaphysical mystery while pondering the fact that the simultaneous personal activity of ten players each pursuing their own goal somehow gets combined into a seamless, singular basketball game? Why don’t we feel the need for an explanation for how all this individual activity gets combined into a “game”?

After all, isn’t it baffling the way virtually all spectators can agree on the nature of the unified game activity—Orange team ran out to a big lead by halftime largely on the strength of their long-range shooting, but then Green team tightened up their defense and started attacking the paint and managed to eke out the win on a buzzer-beater.

How it it possible to summarize a single, canonical narrative about game activity, which most observers can agree upon, even though the game activity itself consists of many independent agents pursuing their own goals through myriad simultaneous interactions?

Purpose. What binds together all the player activity into a game is purpose. All game activity pursues purpose—usually multiple purposes simultaneously. The purpose of game activity is to determine a winner. The purpose of team activity involving five players wearing the same uniform is to score more points than the other team. The purpose of individual player activity is more diverse. Some players want to score as many points as possible, some want to disrupt as many shots as possible, some want to get as many rebounds as possible, some want to get revenge on an opposing player for a dirty foul in a previous game.

Here is the key concept behind the solution to Hard Problem Prime:

ALL the activity in your brain is PURPOSEFUL. ALL the activity in your brain is INITIATED BY YOU for a PARTICULAR AIM.

We know from the mechanical nature of perspective that if you initiate activity, you will automatically enjoy first-person perspective on that activity. Because ALL THE ACTIVITY IN YOUR BRAIN IS INITIATED BY YOU, you will automatically and mechanically enjoy first-person perspective on all purposeful activity in your brain.

This holds true at every rung of the ladder of purpose. Modules experience their own modular activity from first-person perspective. Neurons experience their own neural activity from first-person perspective. And so do brains in a supermind; you automatically enjoy first-person perspective on the words that come out of your mouth.

This suggests that for an external observer of your brain activity—such as that neurologist over there hunched over a big MRI machine—it should be straightforward for her to distinguish mental activity in your skull from non-mental activity. If there is a parasite crawling through your cerebrum, for instance, the neurologist watching the parasite activity would recognize that it is not part of mental activity, because the parasite activity is clearly pursuing its own purpose, distinct from mental activity.

It’s easy for a basketball player to recognize (from a first-person perspective) what is game activity and what is not game activity, using purpose. It’s easy for a third-person observer to recognize what is mental activity inside your brain, and what is not, using purpose.

So that tells us that it should be easy for you to recognize, from a first-person perspective, what is your brain activity, and what is not your brain activity, using purpose.

This is the mechanical key unlocking Hard Problem Prime: because you are initiating all the action in your brain (the way the players initiate all the action in a game), your self-initiated purposeful activity experiences all the other activity in your brain relative to the experiencing activity’s purpose, just as a basketball player will experience another player’s blocking activity relative to their own purposeful shooting activity (“He is blocking me, blocking me, I will push harder, I JUMP UP HIGHER AND I PUT THE BALL IN THE HOOP OVER HIS HEAD!”)

All activity in your brain pursues a goal. Maybe you are a basketball player and your brain decides you want to swat the basketball. The basketball becomes your target—your purpose.

Let’s trace out how purpose gives shape to your conscious experience when you decide to swat the basketball.

Your intention initiates activity at every level of your brain’s hierarchy—molecular activity, neural activity, modular activity.

First, your intention creates a mental goal (swat the ball) that is sustained within stable recurrent loops between the cortex and thalamus that include Why module resonance—embodying the conscious desire to swat the ball. This “desire to swat the ball” will fuel and govern all subsequent mental activity. All subsequent activity will be evaluated against the goal in real-time, embodied stably and neurally in the prefrontal cortex. And because all this mental activity is purpose-driven, it’s all experienced from first-person perspective.

Next, you need to locate the target. Your purposeful intent activates your Visual Where module and commands it to locate the basketball in the visual scene around you. You expect to see the basketball because you are in a basketball game and your opponent is performing a jump shot. Your purposeful intent initiates Expectation activity in your Visual Where module, which seeks to match up with Reality activity embodying the visual perception of the basketball in space.

Your Visual Where module locates the basketball—held in both hands by the opposing player, who has just started a jump shot by bending his knees to leap—and resonates on its location, generating qualia that highlights exactly where to reach.

Because you chose to pursue the basketball, your purpose creates the resonance in the Visual Where module. (Mechanically, by providing the Expectation activity to the Where module and biasing the consciousness cartel to favor the Where module.) The qualia or conscious experience generated by the Visual Where resonance is also part of the overall ball-swatting purpose: the qualia of seeing the ball contains orangeness (the target color, which consciously assures you that you’re swatting the right target). The qualia of seeing the ball also contains a roundish surface, also indicating that you’re swatting the right target.

Because your purpose is to swat the basketball, and your brain previously learned that basketballs are round and orange and can be found in players’ hands, your Visual Where activity (which, mechanically, is shaped like a basketball in a spatial neural array) confirms that your purposeful action is successful so far—you’ve identified the target in space to reach for! The resulting Where module resonance is experienced mechanically by your initiating activity (I will try to swat the ball!)

You experience orangeness and roundness and how-far-awayness because that’s the qualia your purpose needs to experience to hit the ball. The details of your subjective experience—your qualia—are determined mechanically by the specific neural dynamics of the resonating features, which we explored in the third article in this series. That article explained why specific activity generates specific experiential qualities; this article is attempting to show how all these specific experiential qualities get combined into your experience.

Purposeful intent triggers purposeful visual seeking triggers purposeful resonance. All these activities share the same “team” purpose: swatting the basketball, even though each individual activity has a different aim (such as locating the basketball in space).

Next, the Where module’s resonant activity triggers the action of the How module, continuing the purposeful brain activity aiming to swat the basketball. The How module’s reaching activity interacts with the Where module resonance and begins to stretch out your hand toward the basketball, using the Where module’s resonant activity as the guide. You consciously experience your hand moving closer to the ball—and then smack it!

This experience of your hand moving is generated by Proprioception module activity that resonates on the location of your hand relative to your body. You consciously experience the location of your hand (even if you don’t see your hand) because of the specific mechanical details of the resonating features in the Proprioception module, which are experienced from a first-person perspective by your How module (which uses this activity to guide your hand) and by your goal-seeking activity (swatting the basketball, fueled by resonance in your Why module, experienced as the desire to swat the ball because of the resonating features of the Why module’s value-object resonance.)

That’s the chain of purposeful activity. So why do you experience all this collective activity (probably involving hundreds of millions of neurons—but not all your neurons) as your conscious experience?

Because all of the activity was initiated by you for a particular aim and at every moment during the resulting mental activity your brain is adjusting in real-time your purposeful attempt at swatting the basket. All of this mental activity is unified by your intent. All this purposeful activity—like the activity of all the players on the same basketball team—aims for the same goal.

Your experience of swatting the basketball is dictated by how the purposeful brain activity embodying this goal mechanically interacts with other brain activity necessary to achieve this goal. Because you are initiating the activity, you experience all other brain activity from a first-person perspective, ultimately given mechanically by the trajectory of your hand as it reaches for the ball.

We can take any subjective quality of your conscious experience of swatting the basketball and explain its physical basis (what’s happening in your brain and where) and show how the resulting conscious experience is generated by your purposeful mental activity interacting with resonant activity involved with your purpose.

You experience orangeness (because your expect to see an orange basketball and the Reality activity matches your Expectation activity) and you experience striving with all your might (because of the resonance of the Why module) and you experience success (resonating in the Why module when you swat the ball).

All these experiences are experienced as your experiences, because you are initiating the activity that generates these experiences.

Mechanically, this is the same as a team experiencing a basketball victory as our victory because the team initiated all the activity that led to the victory.

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A cleaner and more detailed revision will come soon…

1. Grossberg, S. (1975). A neural model of attention, reinforcement, and discrimination learning. International Review of Neurobiology, 18, 263-327.

Grossberg, S. (1976). Adaptive pattern classification and universal recoding, I: Parallel development and coding of neural feature detectors. Biological Cybernetics, 23, 121-134.

Then in 1980, he stated with confidence “The functional unit of cognitive coding is suggested to be an adaptive resonance, or amplification and prolongation of neural activity that occurs when afferent data and efferent expectancies reach consensus through a matching process. The resonant state embodies the perceptual event [Steve’s term for conscious experience at the time], or attentional focus, and its amplified and sustained activities are capable of driving slow changes of long-term memory. Mismatch between afferent data and efferent expectancies yields a global suppression of activity and triggers a reset of short-term memory, as well as rapid parallel search and hypothesis testing for uncommitted cells."

Steve wrote to Sai Gaddam and I in 2021: “By saying that ‘the resonant state embodies the perceptual event’, I was implicitly saying that it is the event of which we become conscious. In those days, explicitly using the word "consciousness" was frowned upon, and my theory was the only one (still is) in which a dynamical brain state represents the contents of individual conscious events in real time.

2. Carpenter, G. A., & Grossberg, S. (1987). A massively parallel architecture for a self-organizing neural pattern recognition machine. Computer vision, graphics, and image processing, 37(1), 54-115.

3. Chalmers first introduced the “hard problem of consciousness” in a lecture in 1994. He first published it in “Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness” in 1995.

4. Grossberg, S. (2017). Towards solving the hard problem of consciousness: The varieties of brain resonances and the conscious experiences that they support. Neural Networks, 87, 38-95.

5. I started tackling consciousness seriously in the 1990s, and all academic roads led to Daniel Dennett and his mathless crew, none of whom understood Grossberg’s work.