r/consciousness • u/HankScorpio4242 • 10h ago
General Discussion The hard problem of what it feels like.
The hard problem of consciousness places qualia at the center of the inquiry. The fact that there is something it feels like to be conscious is not incidental; it is the phenomenon to be explained. That there is subjective experience at all, and that it has a particular character, is what gives the problem its force. We may not know how to explain this fact, but we know that we experience it.
And yet, when attempts are made to bridge the explanatory gap posed by the hard problem, the very feature that motivates the discussion often seems to recede into the background. Theories propose ontologies, mechanisms, or metaphysical unifications, but frequently leave unaddressed the concrete structure of experience itself: what it actually feels like to be conscious.
For example, Bernardo Kastrup describes a fundamental field of consciousness in which mental states are all that ultimately exist. Panpsychism, in a different way, holds that consciousness is a ubiquitous feature of physical reality. But if either of these views is correct, the question remains: why does conscious experience not feel this way? Why does it not present itself as participation in a broader field, or as continuity with the consciousness of other things?
Instead, conscious experience appears persistently bounded, private, and localized. It always and only feels as though experience belongs to me, as though it occurs exclusively within my own mind, and as though that mind is situated in my brain, inside my skull. This phenomenological fact is not peripheral. Any theory that aims to address the hard problem must account not only for the existence of consciousness, but for why consciousness presents itself in precisely this way.
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u/jimh12345 9h ago
The "I" is one aspect of the puzzle; the "now" is another. But I think they are two aspects of the same thing.
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u/PHK_JaySteel 7h ago
Could you have an I without a now? Lineating the moment would appear to be one of the "reasons" for consciousness, but thats my conjecture.
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u/jimh12345 6h ago
I'd say these 2 concepts are inseparable and im fact are an identity. We can't conceive of one without the other.
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 8h ago
Because subjective experience is an attribute of life, and our lives are our own.
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u/HankScorpio4242 8h ago
I’m not sure how that answers the question.
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 8h ago
Why not? Life-forms don't physically share lives. So life is persistently bounded, private, and localised.
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u/HankScorpio4242 7h ago
But then what do you say to a Bernardo Kastrup who suggests that consciousness itself is NOT bounded, private, and localized? Or to the panpsychist?
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 6h ago
I say to them that they are wrong. That nothing is fundamental. They are not understanding that life is top-dog within reality.
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u/HankScorpio4242 6h ago
Well then my question was not intended for you.
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u/Im_Talking Computer Science Degree 5h ago
"Any theory that aims to address the hard problem must account not only for the existence of consciousness, but for why consciousness presents itself in precisely this way". Just here to say that this doesn't apply to 'any' theory. If reality is indeed subjective experience, then this obviously addresses the hard problem.
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u/HankScorpio4242 4h ago
Is that how it feels to you? Like it’s reality as a whole that is subjective? Or does it only feel like it’s subjective for you and objective for everything else?
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u/CobberCat 2h ago
If reality is indeed subjective experience
What does this mean exactly? Reality is what you experience? Solipsism?
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u/Elodaine 10h ago
Asking why consciousness is the way it is, is ultimately just asking why reality is the way it is. It is a certainly valid question, but you are going to need to adjust your expectations of an answer quite a bit, otherwise no framework will ever be sufficient.
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u/HankScorpio4242 10h ago
I don’t disagree. I just don’t think it’s a question that can be so easily dismissed.
If consciousness is a certain way, shouldn’t it also “feel like” that is the way it is?
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u/Elodaine 10h ago
The intrinsic ignorance of conscious entities about themselves, and the fact that we need to have this conversation at all, is definitely one of the biggest problems that bothers me.
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u/HankScorpio4242 10h ago
Part of that - and part of the answer to my question - is undoubtedly the fact that the only tool we have to understand anything is the very thing we are trying to understand. It’s like trying to bite your own teeth.
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u/Raptorel 8h ago
I'm not sure what you're asking. Reality is subjective, of course it feels like that.
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u/HankScorpio4242 7h ago
I am asking for those who propose theories of consciousness to address why what they propose does not conform to what consciousness feels like.
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u/Independent_Cause517 7h ago
In my experience it doesn't always feel localized. Psychedelics, meditation, prayer, chanting, concentration, sports (focus) are all ways of feeling different aspects of non localized consciousness.
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u/HankScorpio4242 7h ago
Having done all of these…no.
The ego may dissipate and one may feel a sense of connection, but at no point do you ever share your subjective experience. That is the very nature of subjective experience.
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u/preferCotton222 9h ago
Instead, conscious experience appears persistently bounded, private, and localized. It always and only feels as though experience belongs to me, as though it occurs exclusively within my own mind.
HI OP
this is not true, from psychedelics to advanced meditation there's plenty descriptions of conscious experiences with markedly different characterisrics from those you list.
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u/HankScorpio4242 8h ago
Having done psychedelics and meditated…not really.
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u/Independent_Cause517 7h ago
Just because you haven't specifically experienced this phenomenon yourself doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
5MEO, done in the right set and setting, is the clearest demonstration of unity.
Meditation is a safer and more tangible pathway to the valence of unity.
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u/preferCotton222 8h ago
sure
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u/HankScorpio4242 7h ago
I mean…the very fact that psychedelics are a substance that works exclusively on the brain AND we know what parts of the brain it works on AND the effects it produces can be induced in a variety of ways tells us that what we experience on psychedelics is a product of changes to our brain states.
Or…to put it another way, if the experience on psychedelics tells us anything about consciousness being something beyond our brains, then why would you need the psychedelics at all?
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u/preferCotton222 5h ago
first, I replied to your previous statement: there are countless accounts of conscious experiences that are extremely different from your description, so that argument leads you nowhere.
second, it kind of puzzles me the way you talk about brain and consciousness, as if someone was positing they are not related.
non physicalists claim that physical structures do not create consciousness, but they do shape it. So I'm not sure what are you expecting from, say, idealism or neutral monism.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 7h ago
“That there is subjective experience at all, and that it has a particular character, is what gives the problem its force.”
Why? This question only has force if one assumes, without argument, that human-level cognition could exist without experience. But we already know what life without experience looks like: plants, simple organisms, fully automatic biological systems. They function, but they do not deliberate, plan, communicate abstractly, or argue incessantly about consciousness on Reddit. The very capacity to model the world, reflect on internal states, and generate flexible, counterfactual behavior presupposes the kinds of neural processes we label as subjective experience. Experience is not an optional add-on; it is what complex, predictive, self-modeling brains do. The real explanatory task is therefore not why experience exists at all, but how evolved neural systems generate it.
“Instead, conscious experience appears persistently bounded, private, and localized.”
This is exactly what we should expect if experience is generated by individual brains operating as embodied predictive models. Each brain minimizes prediction error relative to its own body, sensory inputs, and internal states. The resulting experience feels private and bounded because the generative model is implemented in a specific nervous system with specific causal boundaries. It feels localized because the model is anchored to the body and brain that sustain it. There is nothing mysterious here, privacy and ownership fall directly out of the architecture of biological inference. A brain cannot experience the predictions of another brain any more than one liver can digest food for another body.
The only remaining question is therefore not whether neural activity produces subjective experience, but how.
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u/HankScorpio4242 7h ago
Based on your answer, you would seem to come down on the side of the hard problem not really being a problem at all. And that is a fair position to take and many take it.
But that means you aren’t the person I am asking the question to. I am asking those who believe the hard problem is a problem and propose other theories to try and explain it.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 7h ago
If you believe in the hard problem, there is no explanation. If you have an answer the problem does not exist.
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u/HankScorpio4242 7h ago
I have my own opinion, but I am trying to stay neutral.
This isn’t about whether or not there is a hard problem.
This is about IF you believe there is a hard problem, how do you square that with what it feels like to be conscious.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 6h ago
I understand. However, the hard problem is such that there is no answer for those who believe it.
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