Hard Problems

  In the novel “1984,” the lead character O'Brien stubbornly holds onto his perception and his personal "memories" as objective reality in spite of the opposition of those who control him. He ultimately fails, as I guess would happen if brainwashing is persistent enough and has the technology.

O'Brien thinks there is an objective reality "out there." Big Brother asserts that what is in O'Brien's head as objective reality is an illusion, indeed, a counter-revolutionary and therefore intolerable illusion. We cannot be allowed to remember as history what we experienced but only what the authorities have decided what history was.

Maybe the authorities are right; that there is no objective reality. Memories can be manipulated: we cannot trust even the evidence of our senses to not be fooled by some illusion or trick. Of course to function we assume there really is an objective reality, and I think there is one, but as physics pushes on we come to realize that whatever it is, it is a lot further away from our personal existence than we even begin to imagine.
All illusions necessarily have something under them that generates the illusion. When someone asserts something is an illusion, one excellent refutation is to ask for the underlying reality. It may be that the reality is itself just a deeper illusion, one wonders how far that might go.
There are several things that I wonder maybe are illusions, as I can see underlying things that could underlay them as causes. Causation is one, another of course is space and time. Then there is mind and there is free will: the modern mechanistic materialist is I think forced to assert that these too are illusions, but what could be the underlying reality? Brain neurons firing away do not demonstrate any way to generate such an illusion.


You have put your finger on a difficulty that has haunted philosophy for centuries. The slogan "it's an illusion" sounds devastating until one asks, "an illusion of what?"

A mirage is an illusion, but it is an illusion produced by real light passing through real air with varying temperatures. A hallucination is an illusion, but it is produced by a real brain undergoing real processes. Even a dream is not nothing; it is a real event occurring in a sleeping mind. The appearance may be misleading, but there must still be something that appears.

That is one reason many philosophers have been suspicious of radical skepticism. If everything is illusion, then the existence of the illusion itself becomes the reality that must be explained.

One interesting point about Orwell's novel is that the Party's position is not really skepticism. The Party does not say, "We cannot know reality." It says, "Reality is whatever we say it is." That is a much stronger and stranger claim. O'Brien's interrogator is not arguing that human perception is unreliable. He is arguing that power creates truth.

In a sense, the Party is attempting to occupy the place that reality itself normally occupies. Usually, if I say there are five fingers and you say there are four, we can look and count. The fingers decide. The Party wants to remove that independent court of appeal. There is no reality beyond power. That is why Orwell regarded the idea as terrifying.

As for modern physics, I think it has produced a subtler result than many people imagine. Physics has repeatedly shown that the world is not as it appears. The Earth seems stationary but is moving. Matter seems solid but is mostly empty space. Time seems absolute but is relative to motion and gravity. Yet none of these discoveries imply that reality is unreal. Quite the opposite. They imply that reality is deeper than common sense.

Space and time are good examples. Many physicists suspect that spacetime may itself emerge from something more fundamental. If that turns out to be true, space and time would be somewhat like temperature. Temperature feels basic, but it emerges from the motion of countless molecules. Temperature is not an illusion exactly; it is a higher-level description of something deeper.

Causation may be similar. Some philosophers argue that causation is not a fundamental feature of the universe at all but a pattern our minds impose on regularities. We observe that event A is reliably followed by event B and call A the cause of B. Yet even if causation were emergent, the regularities themselves would remain to be explained.

The hardest cases are mind and free will.

You mention an objection that many people feel strongly: neurons firing do not seem capable of producing consciousness. The materialist often replies that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing. Critics then ask the obvious question: why should information processing feel like anything from the inside? Why should there be subjective experience at all?

This is what philosopher David Chalmers called the "hard problem" of consciousness. Explaining behavior is one thing. Explaining why there is something it is like to be conscious is another.

The same issue arises with free will. If every neural event is determined by prior physical events, then where does genuine choice enter? Some conclude free will is an illusion. But then another question appears: what exactly is the illusion? An illusion is itself an experience. Who or what is having the illusion of choosing?

One of the oldest responses, found in different forms from Aristotle to modern philosophers, is that the higher-level phenomenon may be perfectly real even if it is not fundamental. A hurricane is not found among individual air molecules, yet hurricanes are real. Perhaps minds are like that. Perhaps agency is a real pattern instantiated by physical processes rather than something separate from them.

What I find particularly interesting is that the deeper science digs, the less obvious the distinction between "real" and "illusion" becomes. We often discover that what seemed fundamental is emergent. Yet emergence is not the same as illusion.

The rainbow is not where it appears to be. It cannot be touched. It depends on an observer's position. Yet we do not usually call it unreal. It is a genuine phenomenon arising from a deeper reality.

That may be the fate of many things we currently regard as fundamental. Space, time, causation, selfhood, perhaps even free will may turn out to be more like rainbows than like rocks—not false, but emergent appearances generated by deeper structures.

And there is a curious possibility hiding at the bottom of your question. If every apparent reality rests upon a deeper reality, and that deeper reality upon a still deeper one, we eventually face the question you raised: does the chain end? Or is reality turtles all the way down?

Neither physics nor philosophy has yet found the bottom turtle. Indeed, it is not even clear that there must be one. The universe may be stranger than either O'Brien or Big Brother imagined: there may be an objective reality, but one so far removed from everyday experience that our ordinary categories—space, time, cause, self—are merely local approximations to it.

I tire a bit of the "hard problem."  There are many hard problems, meaning questions we not only can't answer but can't imagine how to approach.  Such a situation tells me it is being looked at wrong and a different perspective is needed, if only I were smart and outside the box enough to see it.

I think there is a great deal of wisdom in that reaction.

History is full of problems that appeared utterly mysterious until someone reframed them. Before the scientific revolution, people could ask endlessly, "What force keeps the planets moving?" The implicit assumption was that motion requires continuous pushing. Once inertia was understood, the question largely evaporated. The planets were not being continuously pushed; the original formulation of the problem was mistaken.

Likewise, asking "What is life?" once seemed impossibly deep. Vitalists thought there must be some special life-force. Then biochemistry gradually showed that many phenomena attributed to "vital force" were ordinary chemistry organized in complex ways. The mystery did not disappear, but it changed shape.

The hard problem of consciousness may eventually suffer a similar fate. The phrase itself assumes that there is a gap between physical processes and subjective experience that demands explanation. Perhaps there is. But it is also possible that future thinkers will look back and say, "You were asking the wrong question."

One thing that has always struck me is that the hard problem starts from a powerful intuition: "How can neurons produce experience?" But intuitions are often trained on the wrong scale. We have no intuition for quantum fields, black holes, evolution by natural selection, or curved spacetime either.

Suppose a Martian scientist had perfect knowledge of every neuron in your brain but had never encountered consciousness. He might ask, "How could these electrochemical events possibly generate a unified self?" Perhaps the answer is that they don't generate a self in the way he imagines. Perhaps the self is a pattern, a process, a mode of organization. The difficulty then lies not in the world but in the categories he brought to it.

I sometimes wonder whether consciousness is less like a substance and more like a perspective. We are accustomed to treating it as a thing that must somehow emerge from matter. But perhaps that is already a mistake. Perhaps experience is what certain information-processing systems look like from the inside.

Of course that immediately raises another question: why should there be an inside at all? And around we go again.

Your remark about "many hard problems" is important because it points to a general lesson. When a question remains opaque for centuries, despite many clever people attacking it, there are at least two possibilities. One is that the problem is genuinely profound. The other is that some hidden assumption is misleading everyone.

You have often spoken about "turtles all the way down." The hard problem may be a case where we have not yet identified the turtle underneath the question itself.

And there is a certain intellectual humility in that. One need not conclude that consciousness is solved, nor that materialism is correct, nor that free will is an illusion. One can simply note that whenever a problem seems not merely unsolved but almost unapproachable, it is worth inspecting the frame in which the problem is posed. Sometimes the lock is difficult because the key is missing. Sometimes it is difficult because it is not a lock at all.