Miller goes on to split Chalmers’s original hard problem into two: the hard exis-
tence problem (why and how do we have phenomenal consciousness at all?) and
the hard character problem (why does particular brain activity feel like this and
not like that?). He claims that multiple realisability might help us ‘sharpen’ the
hard character problem, but not to solve it. He then considers related problems
that may also be genuinely ‘hard’: the problem of direct intersubjective exchange
(how to compare the redness or happiness experienced by two people), and
the problems of ontogeny (e.g. when does consciousness arise in the develop-
ment from zygote to embryo to foetus to baby) and phylogeny (when it arises in
evolution).
In Chapter 5, we will meet some more variations on the hard problem, including
computer scientist Scott Aaronson’s ‘Pretty-Hard Problem’ (2014) of which phys-
ical systems are conscious and which are not. Chalmers splits this new problem
up into four more, including ‘PHP1’, the problem of constructing a theory that
matches our intuitions about which systems are conscious, and ‘PHP4’, the prob-
lem of constructing a theory that tells us which systems have which states of
consciousness.
This leaves us with a lot of hard problems, and a lot of ‘easy’ territory that suddenly
looks very slippery.
5 THERE IS NO HARD PROBLEM
Adopting a more gung-ho optimism, in ‘There is no hard problem of conscious-
ness’ Kieron O’Hara and Tom Scutt (1996) give both methodological and philo-
sophical reasons for ignoring the hard problem. First, we know how to address
the easy problems and should start with them. Second, solutions to the easy
problems will change our understanding of the hard problem, so trying to solve
the hard problem now is premature. A solution to the hard problem would only
be of use if we could recognise it as such, and for the moment the problem is not
well enough understood: indeed, ‘all discussion of [the hard problem] seems to
preclude any sort of answer being given’ (p. 291).
Confusions about consciousness are explored by the British philosopher David
Papineau, who also warns us against trusting too blindly in our intuitions – in
this case, those which tell us that the magic of consciousness arises from the
sogginess of grey matter. According to Papineau, we are seduced into thinking
materialism is false because the concepts and terms we use to refer to brain states
do not involve experiences in the way that words we use when we talk about
mental states or feelings do. We have no problem with accepting that tempera-
ture and mean kinetic energy are just two ways of referring to the same thing, and
we should do the same with pain and nociceptive-specific neuronal activity. The
problem, he suggests, is that instead
We focus on the left-hand side, deploy our phenomenal concept of
pain (that feeling), and therewith feel something akin to pain. Then we
focus on the right-hand side, deploy our concept of nociceptive-specific
neurons, and feel nothing (or at least nothing in the pain dimension –
we may visually imagine axons and dendrites and so on). And so we
conclude that the right hand side leaves out the feeling of pain itself,
the unpleasant what-it’s-likeness, and refers only to the distinct physical
