There is no such thing as ‘the’ hard problem of consciousness. There is instead a large cluster of issues that need to be separated out and addressed in different ways. Only a coordinated effort from different disciplines will allow us to make overall progress.
In my own field of philosophy, the most discussed problem concerns the apparent incompatibility between the existence of consciousness, and the world-view that many regard as non-negotiable from a scientific perspective, physicalism.
The incompatibility problem is an old one, and is redolent of religious ideas about the soul being distinct from the body. But it has been recast using the tools of contemporary philosophy and logic, which allow us to see with considerable clarity what physicalism is, what consciousness is, and what the arguments might be for their incompatibility.
How to solve it? The key thing is to focus on something so small and innocent that most people don’t notice it: that when we think about the physical world we imagine we know what it’s like if not in detail then in outline.
Suppose we go along with that and take ourselves to know fully what the physical world is like. Then we are forced into the familiar set of options most people find impossible: either accept consciousness as a primitive addition to an otherwise physical universe, or deny its existence, or offer implausible oversimplified accounts of what it is.
But suppose instead we agree that our knowledge of the physical world is incomplete in all sorts of ways, including features connected to consciousness. Then the arguments for incompatibility lose their force. If you don’t know fully what the physical world is like, you can’t argue that that consciousness has no place in it.
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