There is no heroic challenge to be faced here, merely an embarrassing sign that our most basic assumptions about the nature of reality are dead wrong.

The hard problem of consciousness is not a problem that needs to be solved, for it doesn’t exist in any objective sense. It is merely an internal contradiction of the reasoning behind metaphysical materialism, a conceptual short-circuit that arises as we logically work out the implications of the materialist conception of matter. There is no heroic challenge to be faced here, merely an embarrassing sign that our most basic assumptions about the nature of reality are dead wrong.

Like the rest of us, metaphysical materialists start from the contents of their own consciousness, such as perceptual experiences. All they are ever directly acquainted with are the colours, flavours and tones they perceive. But in order to explain why the external world we inhabit doesn’t comply with our inner wishes and fantasies, materialists consciously postulate that the world is constituted by a medium outside and independent of consciousness—namely, matter. As such, matter is a tentative explanatory abstraction, a conceptual creation of reasoning consciousness. We can never become directly acquainted with matter, for all we ever know about the world are our conscious perceptions.

Having conjured up matter, materialists then posit that their consciousness—where matter is conceived to begin with—must be reducible to matter; that is, to one of consciousness’s own abstractions. This is a contradiction in terms, specifically because of how materialists define matter.

Indeed, under mainstream materialism matter is defined in purely quantitative terms: measurable values of mass, electric charge, momentum, position, frequency, amplitude, etc. Once these numerical values are determined—be it through direct measurement or inference—they ostensibly say everything there is to be said about matter; nothing else is left. There is nothing about matter that isn’t captured by a list of numbers. Hence, under materialism matter—by definition—has only quantitative properties.

Quantities are useful in describing relative differences between qualities already known experientially, but they completely miss the qualities themselves.

Where does this idea of using quantities to define the world come from? It’s not difficult to see: quantities are very useful to describe the relative differences of the contents of perception. For instance, the relative difference between red and blue can be compactly described by frequency values: blue has a higher frequency than red, so we can quantify the visual difference between the two colours by subtracting one frequency from the other. But frequency numbers cannot absolutely describe a colour: if you tell a congenitally blind person that red is an electromagnetic field vibration of about 430 THz, the person will still have no idea of what it feels like to see red. Quantities are useful in describing relative differences between qualities already known experientially, but they completely miss the qualities themselves.

And here is where materialism incurs its first fatal error: it replaces the qualitative world of colours, tones and flavours—the only external world we are directly acquainted with—with a purely quantitative description that structurally fails to capture any quality whatsoever. It mistakes the usefulness of quantities in determining relative differences between qualities for—absurdly—something that can replace the qualities themselves.