The phrase "Hard Problem of Consciousness" was coined in 1994, and is the subject of no small controversy. It is something that I have attempted to create a satisfactory explanation for over most of my life, to constant frustration. I am writing this article now, not because I have solved the problem, but because I have failed to solve the problem enough times that I am confident I can clearly describe its exact nature. It is in this description of the very nature of the problem that many authors begin to introduce confusion; through a careful propositional structuring of my argument, I intend to avoid this error, and to then convince the reader that my specific interpretation of the hard problem is both the only reasonable belief, and intrinsically, fatally flawed. In doing so, I hope to enable the reader to share in my frustration as it concerns this unsolveable problem.
Consider reading my essay concerning analogies prior to continuing this article.
Defining consciousness is itself no easy task. The term has been used by various authors in various ways, and each of these definitions introduces additional ambiguity. To define exactly what I mean in referring to consciousness, we must first reach an understanding of the scope of the term. Consciousness, as I will use the term, appears to be closely related to the human brain--and so I say that its scope, as far as we are concerned, is limited to complex systems. A complex system may be described as any sufficiently large set of physical objects that interact frequently, and that have been designed, either by intention or by circumstance, to perform some task. In the case of the human brain, that task is of course reproduction and survival. To accomplish that task, the brain must receive sensory information, process it, and, based on the result of that processing, control the body. This process can be modelled at the highest level in psychology, at a lower level in biology, and at the lowest level by physics. At the lowest level, the brain is acting in a (excluding quantum nondeterminism) deterministic manner, defined by the basic interaction of carefully arranged molecules. It is the opinion of some authors that this description of the brain minimizes human agency. I reject this--human agency is itself a product of the process I have described, and cannot be minimized by a description of its origin. The reason for this concern can likely be ascribed to the long-standing belief in some form of soul, or other intangible, immeasurable entity separate from the mechanical processes of the brain.
The soul, spirit, or anima is typically taken to be the entity which contains or defines a person's individual nature. The soul is necessarily quantized, perhaps being able to be created or destroyed but never subdivided, and non-fungible, each being unique in some form. While brain cells may die and the body may change, the soul is a persistent, non-mutable identity. The exact purpose, origin, and location of the soul varies by interpretation. Whether it is responsible for will, or godliness; created at conception, or repurposed, from some prior incarnation in rebirth; or whether it is located in the heart, or in the pineal gland--the soul is a concept that has been invented by multiple independant cultures over human history, and is deeply important to the philosophy and religion of a significant portion of those alive today.
If the brain adequately explains human psychology, if thoughts are merely specific patterns of neurons firing, it seems that there is no place for the soul in modern science.
Suppose we had access to some form of device capable of precisely measuring the exact state of every neuron and neurotransmitter in some test subject's brain. Suppose that we could record this data over a few minutes, and run the tape in reverse, observing the cause of every effect. We would introduce some stimulus to the subject--say, a red cube--who would have been instructed to describe what he sees. We would observe his statement, "I see a red cube," and end the recording. We begin analyzing the data. First, we note which neurons were responsible for signalling the muscular activity required to create speech. We name this set N0. We record the set of all neurons whose axon terminals had interaction with any neuron in N0, and name these after the neuron with which they interacted. We iteratively perform this regress until we have a tree structure which contains every neuron involved in the signal processing from observation to statement.
The question is as follows: would, at any point in the recording, a neuron demonstrate behaviour not in line with the action potential model? Specifically, would a neuron ever fire without a measurable physical cause? In the case where this does occur, we have observed what appears to be something very strange--a physical effect without a physical cause. In the case where this does not occur, we have observed something perhaps stranger.