CONSCIOUSNESS
What's so hard about the Hard Problem?
Stefan Chmelik
The idea of consciousness, what science refers to as ‘The Hard Problem’, has always been a difficult one to discuss, one that philosophers have battled over for centuries and now neuroscientists are engulfed in a disagreement over the leading theories.
For the sake of context, I feel able to argue against the dangers of human exceptionalism and at the same time point to the things that are quite unique to human beings.
As far as we know, humans are the only intelligent life form in the cosmos. It may be statistically likely there are others, but we don’t know that and if there are we are unlikely to ever meet them (given how far away they would be and the universe is expanding).
Given that something has to be alive to have consciousness (parking panpsychic and animism concepts for the sake of this discussion), it’s worth taking a moment to consider the ridiculous improbability of being alive at all. The chances of you specifically sitting there reading this article are so large that I can’t be bothered to type all the zeros.
In ‘The Unlikeliness of Life’ Simon Boas remarks “even the fact that I am dying at 46…how fortunate we are to exist at all; [and especially] how lucky we are to exist when and how we do.”
We can admit that the human ability for complex language, advanced tools and the ability to make fire at will is pretty unique. Making fire in itself is a magical power with the ability to transform matter, something truly alchemical and probably at the root of our ancestral development and technological tree.
On every continent where humans have lived there is a version of the fire origin story, usually stolen by some trickster and unleashed as a great power that is as dangerous as it is illuminating and transformational: coyote, rabbit, bird, raven, crow, mantis, spider, possum, Prometheus, Maui, and humankind. In the Ancient Greek Pantheon, the first offering is always to Hestia, the Goddess of the Hearth, the keeper of hearth and homefire, whose fire must never be allowed to go out, must always be tended and attended to.
Transformation of something crude into something precious is the process that we are doing when we attend to ourselves through reflection and meditation. This is an alchemical process. We need to tend and grow in ourselves to be able to transform our inner world. But when the heat of transformation is not directed in the right way it can damage and burn out everything around it. This is just like stress and feelings of overwhelm.
"There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery," Darwin wrote, but only a few other animals seem to have what we might call consciousness - corvids, cetaceans, octopuses (some crustaceans and maybe wrasse, zebrafish, bees and fruitflies) - if we define consciousness as the ability to recognise and acknowledge self and ‘I’ (or to do things that don’t have an immediate ‘purpose’).
Are animals conscious? Asks BBC Science Correspondent Pallab Ghosh. Many experts believe that the emergence of new evidence signifies a complete review in thinking on the science of animal consciousness.
Now a new theory has emerged amongst scientists, one that is creating great controversy in the consciousness debate. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) claims that consciousness can be defined as a mathematical spectrum, but critics are concerned that the idea could be misused to influence sensitive ethical debates around abortion and the sentience of AI. Some researchers fear that giving credibility to ITT, or giving the public that idea that it is a leading theory of consciousness, could affect ethical decisions The main concern is that IIT is not based on empirical evidence and is inconsistent with physical laws.
(New Scientist. 10 May 2025)
However, the theories of IIT and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) focus on the idea that consciousness arises in the brain, rather than as part of a larger system. The outcome being that researchers tend to rely on brain scans for evidence supporting their pet theory.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch says “It feels like something” to exist. I can’t describe it to you if you’re a zombie. If you were born blind, I can never describe what it means to see colors. You are simply unable to comprehend that. So it is with consciousness. It’s impossible to describe it unless you have it…The difference between nothing and something is a base-level consciousness.”
Is the Hard Problem Really So Hard?
Nautilus magazine brought together Neuroscientisis Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth to share their insights into neuroscience’s big question. Basically, because you are reading this piece, we can say that you have consciousness, “that magic of awareness that you are alive and awake.”
And that’s the hard bit about consciousness; it's a subjective, qualitative experience rather than an objective, quantitative one, and qualities of experience seem impossible to describe scientifically, which is why the realm of consciousness has been mostly populated by philosophers, poets, artists and clergy. It may not be so much a hard problem, as an impossible one.
Because you are not a ‘brain in a jar’ it’s reasonable to say that our ability to perceive and be aware is largely dependent on the sensory information we are processing. But wait, there are at least around 21 senses and most of these are not in the brain. There are perhaps less talked about because they are not part of the ‘Fives Senses” Aristotle allotted to humans in De Anima c350 BC, so there has been recognition of ‘Mind-body problem’ for at least 387 years
The ‘body as a machine’ to transport the brain around idea is still prevalent in mainstream science (I go into more detail on this in my article ‘How to Come to Your Senses’). However, it’s now commonly accepted that many parts of the body have an impact on how we feel. The gut microbiome controls ‘gut feelings’ and probiotic therapy is regarded as one possible future for mental health treatment. The heart really does control how we empathise and connect with others (‘love’) and fascia has been shown to have a significant role in the regulation of hormones, to name a few examples. Many emotions, including anxiety and worry, have a physical/body (somatic) basis.
So how do we describe the impossible?
I often use the story of the frog and the tadpoles. Are you sitting comfortably?
There is a pond and it has many tadpoles in it. One is a little more developed than the rest and jumps out of the pond onto dry land. “Whao!”, thinks the frog, “I didn’t know all this was here!”. Excited the frog leaps back into the pond and tells his tadpole mates about his discovery. “Dry land?”. They ask, finding it quite impossible to understand something that is beyond their experience so far. “Is that like wet?”. When the frog tries to explain that dry is ‘not wet’, it’s understandable that they have no clue what he is on about, and just think he has gone off the rails.
The meaning of this story? That it’s impossible to truly know the terrain from a map. Sure, we can build markers or a roadmap for a conceptual understanding of a problem, but these can never be more than maps, a 2D version of a multi-sensory reality and that is not the same thing as having walked the space, to know it.
So humans have always resorted to methods that attempt to make us see the world with new eyes, including music, art, poetry. There are many global examples of ‘teaching stories’ that use absurdity, humour and the impossible to help us see the possible, including the Zen Koan, the stories of the Mulla Nasruddin and myth and fable. “Stories are how we navigate the world, remarked George Monbiot in Out of the Wreckage (2017).
Joseph Campbell, most well known for his account of the Heroic Journey in 1949’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, describes the problem of explaining difficult concepts without direct experience, and why there is such a number of stories (but really only one story) about crossing the threshold into a liminal space, about the descent into the the Underworld, the Labyrinth, the land of shadows…
Campbell has this to say - Crossing of the return threshold.
“The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other, different as life and death, as day and night. The Hero adventures out of the land we know, into darkness there, accomplishes his adventure, or again, is simply lost to us, imprisoned or in danger, and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone, nevertheless. And here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol, the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know, and the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero, the values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.”
(Please note, this was written in 1949, before people became more intelligent about the use of pronouns).
Mark McCartney asks guest Dr Richard Claydon on the What is a Good Life podcast:
“From your perspective, just what is helpful in moving that person towards either the deeper expression of it or even asking more explicitly, even asking for help. How do you see people navigate that?
“You evoke one of perhaps modern philosophy's first ideas, Plato's cave, the psychic prison. I'm stuck in a version of reality. You're in a cave where there's a flickering light and shadows on the wall, and you think that's the world. You don't realise this rich, luscious landscape outside, outside the cave door, because your backs to it, and you just see the light. And so the challenge is, how do you lead somebody out of the cave?
And now there's no guaranteed way to actually do that, because people are very happy in their cave, and it's a very scary thing to go outside the cave. And then if you've watched the cartoon The Kroods, that's how it starts. They won't go outside of the cave, because it's this big, scary world.”
Societies have developed various ways to guide people out of their cave, including traditional Rights of Passage, Visions Fasts and Quests, time on the land and in the wild and guidance from Elders such as wisemen, shaman, priests and druids.
Whatever guide process you gravitate towards, the journey remains the same but the guide is important, as it’s difficult to navigate a journey with just a map.
Many blessings to you and those that you love.
About Stefan & online appts
Stefan Chmelik is co-founder of and inventor of the Sensate stress reduction system. Founder of New Medicine Group in Harley Street and founder of immersive retreat provider Nature Awaken
Refs:
On the Unlikeliness of Life: Why We’re Still Lucky to Be Alive Today
Are animals conscious?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv223z15mpmo
From Nautilus - What do you mean when you say “it feels like something” to exist?
What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?
Your Anxiety Might Be Coming From Your Body
Photo by Ashley Batz
So much to comment on!
1. Just finished reading David Abram's THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS, and he indicts Socrates and Aristotle for this cave idea, which then spawns Descartes's separation of mind from body. Abram also chooses non-pictographic writing as a point which separated humans from their direct experience of the world. Super interesting.
2. I don't know about these 21 senses! Where do I find out more? I believe that imaginative intelligence, as opposed to rational intelligence, is drawing on information from all these senses and doesn't operate in words. One of the reasons why we write: to understand and convey these unarticulated experiences.
3. Bears have been observed watching sunsets. Are they feeling beauty? I think beauty is a sensation that belongs to imaginative intelligence. That's why it's so hard to convey in words.