The hard problem of consciousness was made famous by the philosopher David Chalmers. He introduced it at the first Towards a Science of Consciousness conference in 1994. He defined it as the problem of “how and why” physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective conscious experiences (i.e., tasting wine or seeing the colors of a rainbow). He elaborated on it a few years later in his influential book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory .
Part of what made his analysis useful was that Chalmers distinguished between what he called “easy” problems and “hard” problems. The easy problems deal with brain function and behavior. For example, to explain why a frog zaps a fly with its tongue, we can think of its brain as a kind of neural information processing center that governs the frog’s body. This system contains a matrix that picks up visual stimuli that behaves in the same way that flying insects do. There are motor response programs that fire the tongue.
But does the frog really see the fly? Does success or failure in catching a fly lead to pleasure or frustration? Is there anything like being a frog on the inside? Or are frogs “zombies” (the philosophical term for having no conscious subjective experience at all)? To the extent that frogs are active “on the outside,” an open scientific question is whether they have conscious subjective experiences.
In The Conscious Mind , Chalmers described the easy problems as “psychological” in nature. They are problems that concern behavioral outcomes and related neurocognitive functions, but are not directly related to subjective experience. By contrast, he described subjective experiences as “phenomenal” aspects of the mind. The difference between the two is clear in the case of the frog. We know a great deal about the frog’s neurocognitive activity, which can be defined in terms of the functional relationships between the frog’s brain and its behavior in its environmental context. But we know little about its phenomenal experience, including the question of whether it has any experience.
The unified epistemology UTOK1 is consistent with Chalmers’ analysis in many respects. But it approaches the problem from a completely new angle. Chalmers was trained first as a physicist, then as a philosopher. As such, he approaches the issue from the perspective of its philosophical nature. This can be framed by the question: What is consciousness, and how does it fit into the physical universe?
I was trained as a clinical psychologist. My journey toward a unified theory of psychology began around the same time that the new science of consciousness was born. At the time, I was learning to be a psychotherapist and wanted a coherent scientific framework to base my approach. It turns out that there is no coherent scientific framework. Why? Because, as I have explained in detail in numerous blogs, journal articles, and two books1,2,3,4,5, psychology is not a cohesive discipline. It lacks a coherent identity and subject matter. It is something I have called “the problem of psychology.” Why and how did the problem of psychology arise? Psychology began as the science of consciousness. We can see this in two of its earliest established lines. First, there were the psychophysicists of the mid-19th century. They looked at the relationship between physical stimuli and sensation and developed “psychophysical laws” that still influence research today (e.g., absolute threshold and just noticeable difference). Then came Wilhelm Wundt, who formally founded psychology in 1879. He formulated it as the science of human consciousness and trained people in methods of self-reflection. Wundt’s methods and findings were attacked by functionalists and behaviorists, and his approach, which came to be known as structuralism, died.
His death was caused by a “gap” when it came to subjective experience. The gap was both epistemological and ontological. The epistemological gap was the fact that the nature of science is that it is based on behaviors that can be measured and verified through interpersonal agreement. The ontological gap is what Chalmers refers to as the hard problem.
Behaviorists such as John Watson believed that the brain was like a set of wires on a switchboard and that behavior resulted from how electrical impulses triggered responses. But consciousness was a mystery and was banned from behavioral psychology. Decades later, the cognitive revolution occurred and cognitive psychology adopted the concept of the brain as a kind of neural information-processing system. The result was that psychology became compatible with functional analyses of behavior and mental processes, which are analyzed through the methods of science.
But as I have shown in my writings on the problem of psychology, this means that psychology has completely failed to solve the existential problem. It means that psychology has been defined as a methods-based discipline—and psychologists have no clear, unanimously agreed-upon framework for what they mean by “mind.”
The Current Science of Consciousness is Round Two
The thirty years since the first Towards a Science of Consciousness conference have seen an explosion of interest in consciousness. Yet, despite all this activity, serious problems have emerged. A recent massive review of the “landscape” of consciousness theories identified nearly 85 different angles and approaches! There is debate about whether progress is being made on the hard problem. Consider that in 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet Chalmers a nice glass of wine that progress would be made in the next twenty-five years in answering the question of what consciousness is. Koch lost the bet and paid out in 2023. There has also been serious internal conflict between different approaches. For example, last year, integrated information theory, one of the most popular and widely researched approaches, was attacked in an open letter from over 100 researchers who accused it of being “pseudoscience.” This attack reminded me of the attacks made by behavioral scientists on Wundt and the structuralists.
My father is an emeritus professor of history. A common phrase in our household growing up was one of the great historians’ proverbs: those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it.
Given that scientific psychology began as a science of consciousness and failed, one might think that the history of psychology and the problem it created would be relevant to the new science of consciousness. However, as far as I can tell, no single approach to the comprehensive review of the consciousness landscape has addressed the problem of psychology. Instead, the ideas have mostly come from philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists grappling with how consciousness fits into the universe as defined by physics. As a theoretical psychologist who knows the history of psychology, I am here to say, “We’ve been here before!”
The hard problem of consciousness has been around for over a century, and it has ended up shattering psychology. As such, we may need a new framework for this problem. Perhaps we should go back to the problem of psychology, and see if we can approach it from that angle. When we approach this problem from the perspective of AUT, a new solution to the difficulties becomes clear.
