The epistemic challenges of the meta-problem of consciousness

The meta-problem of consciousness 

Philosopher David Chalmers elucidated the hard problem of consciousness in 1995. Namely, there is no way, even in principle, to reduce the qualities of conscious experience to physical entities, which are purely quantitative. As such, despite it being the mainstream paradigm of today’s academic science and philosophy, we cannot explain (again, even in principle) how consciousness could emerge from or reduce to states of the physical brain (Chalmers 1995, 2003). 

Perplexingly, we have discovered hundreds of neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCCs), but no causal link between the brain and our conscious experience (Koch 2004, 2018; Kastrup 2019).

In 2018, 23 years after first elucidating this paradox, Chalmers suggested another approach to resolving the seemingly insoluble hard problem of consciousness.

Instead of directly addressing the hard problem, let’s first answer the meta-problem of consciousness. Why do we think that consciousness is difficult to explain? Why do we feel that there is something special about consciousness that separates our raw, internal awareness from, say, the “easy problems of consciousness,“ various algorithmic cognitive functions that could occur without consciousness? According to Chalmers, if we can resolve the meta-problem, itself one of the “easy problems,” perhaps that solution would shed light on the hard problem (Chalmers 2018).

In this article, I’ll argue that we think consciousness is special precisely because it is special. More specifically, I will make a case that a series of epistemological challenges is at the root of the hard problem of consciousness, and that these challenges are what render the hard problem insoluble. I’ll analyze the epistemic claims and burdens of the major metaphysical theories of consciousness on the table today, in order to further demonstrate the impact of those challenges on our continuing struggle to understand consciousness, even as we strive to create it via artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).

Note that when I use the term “consciousness” throughout this writing, I refer to phenomenal consciousness, as defined in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, and not to meta-consciousness or to the cognitive functions of the “easy problems.” That is, I refer to the raw subjective awareness that underlies our conscious experiences. Or, put another way,  to the “field” of raw subjectivity, whose excitations are experiences (Nagel 1974; Block 1995; Schooler 2002; Winkielman 2009, 2011; Kastrup 2019).

Why consciousness is special 

The challenge we face in explaining consciousness is unlike any other that we find in the natural sciences and philosophy, because we can study everything else from a third-person, observational perspective. However, in the case of our consciousness, we must study the perceiver. The observer, itself, must be made the object of observation. But even the word “object” portrays consciousness as a “thing,” which would be a flawed, Cartesian way of considering what consciousness is. 

Consciousness is nature’s one given. Regardless of its metaphysical status, consciousness is epistemically fundamental. It is the primary datum of our existence, such that it is the only “thing” to which we have direct access. Everything else we know, we know only by, in, and through consciousness (Harris 2019; Kastrup 2019). 

As such, consciousness is indeed special. It forces us to confront questions that empiricists find uncomfortable. How can we understand consciousness, our first-person perspective, if we consider introspection an invalid source of evidence? 

How do we reconcile the epistemic problems of applying our standard methods of observational science to our first-person subjectivity? How do we account for the biases and religious impulses that we project onto consciousness? For instance, those advocating for religious belief systems often use “consciousness” as a substitute for “soul,” and metaphysics as an excuse for spiritual bypassing of empirical science. Similarly, one could argue that illusionism and eliminativism on the physicalist side of the debate are logically incoherent, powered more by their anti-religious agenda and New Atheism than by rigorous philosophical argument. How can consciousness argue for its own non-existence, unless ulterior motives and biases are at play?

Another counter often leveled against the meta-problem, and more generally the notion that consciousness poses a special challenge, is that we eventually solved what you could call the “hard problem of life.” At one time, we thought that life, too, was in its own special category. Élan vital was proposed by Henri Bergson as the “life force” by which we could explain evolution and the development of organisms (Bergson 1907). Of course, biologists and geneticists reject this idea today, as we’ve identified the electrochemical constituents of life (Azarian 2022).

The argument then goes something like this: because we have shown that life is not special, we will eventually show that consciousness is not special, either. We will eventually remove the mystery around consciousness, just the way that we removed the need to postulate a “life force” to explain life.

This argument, too, fails to address the epistemic challenges posed by consciousness, because even life itself is not on the same epistemic level as consciousness. For what is life, really? It is a concept that exists in consciousness. We developed our notion of “life” in order to describe the objects of our perception, which are themselves experiences in consciousness. 

The perceiver comes before that which is perceived. As such, consciousness epistemically precedes even life itself and the electrochemical constituents of biogenesis. Therefore, the argument comparing the hard problem of consciousness to the problem of life, so as to invalidate the hard problem, fails. 

In other words, because consciousness is epistemically fundamental, it is special. That is the answer to Chalmers’s meta-problem of consciousness.

Each of the major metaphysical theories on the table today encounters these epistemic problems, which in turn generate conceptual paradoxes like the hard problem of consciousness for physicalism, the interaction problem of dualism, the combination problem of panpsychism, and the decombination problem of idealism. 

Whatever nature is, in and of itself, it does not actually contain these paradoxes. Rather, the above problems are the product of our own conceptual misunderstanding. Nature is not trying to fool us. Nature does what it does, and it is on us to make sure that our thoughts are clear. 

The hard problem of consciousness, then, is not a problem to be solved. Rather, it is a sign that, somewhere in the history of human science and philosophy, we made false assumptions. We must, therefore, retrace our steps back to the last safe claim, and then start again from that point. 

Epistemic challenges of the major metaphysics

Every metaphysical worldview must account for the existence of consciousness. In so doing, they face the previously elucidated epistemic challenges. In the next sections, we’ll examine each of the four major metaphysics’ claims about consciousness, paying attention to the epistemic problems each encounters. 

Physicalism

Physicalism accounts for consciousness by making the following series of claims:

1. Physical entities have ontic existence independently of consciousness.
2. The physical is the only ontological category. 
3. It follows from 1 and 2 that consciousness must be physical.
4. It follows from 1, 2, and 3 that physical parameters, such as metabolic brain states, generate consciousness. 
5. Therefore, consciousness reduces to, or emerges from, the physical brain. 

The hard problem of consciousness is the direct result of taking that which is epistemically fundamental as supervenient to that which it perceives. That is, we start from consciousness, we have qualitative perceptual experiences, we apply the mental concepts of physicality and quantitative mathematics to our perceptual experiences, and then physicalism makes the above claims. 

It is a case of pulling the territory from the map (Kastrup 2019), as physicalism makes the description not only precede, but also generate, the thing described. 

In other words, the positive claim that the physical exists outside of consciousness can never be verified or falsified, since we have no direct access to anything except consciousness, itself. If that claim cannot be verified or falsified, then the subsequent premises, which depend on that claim, also fall.

As a result of this epistemic knot, we encounter the hard problem. There is no way, even in principle, to reduce the qualities of experience to quantitative physical entities, because doing so is pulling the territory from the map, epistemically. That attempt at reduction from qualities to quantities is arguably also the source of paradoxes such as the measurement problem of quantum mechanics, the apparent fine-tuning problem, and others across the natural sciences. 

Dualism

Dualism accounts for consciousness by making the following series of claims:

1. Physical entities have ontic existence independently of consciousness.
2. Consciousness has ontic existence independently of the physical.  
3. It follows from 1 and 2 that the physical and consciousness must interact in some way. 

Dualism faces the interaction problem because, unlike monist physicalism, it claims that there are two fundamental ontic categories: the physical and consciousness. The connection to traditional religious notions of body and soul should be obvious. 

The advantage of dualism is that it avoids the hard problem, since a dualist doesn’t try to reduce consciousness to the physical. However, the challenge then shifts to explaining how two separate ontic entities interact, giving us our body-mind composite. 

Though the filter hypothesis, in which the brain acts like a radio filtering the “frequency” of consciousness, is both intuitive (it accounts for the NCCs and the lack of a causal connection between brain and mind) and popular in western culture, empirical evidence explaining the specifics of that interaction has not been found. 

Once again, it is epistemology at the heart of the problem. Like the physicalist, the dualist has a starting point of consciousness. They have perceptual experiences. They create the mental concept of “physical” to describe those perceptual experiences. They then give ontic existence to the physical, but also claim that consciousness has ontic existence too. 

And, like the physicalist, the dualist finds it impossible to verify or falsify the positive claim that the physical exists outside of consciousness, because consciousness is epistemically fundamental. 

Constitutive panpsychism 

Constitutive panpsychism accounts for consciousness by making the following series of claims:

1. Physical entities have ontic existence independently of consciousness.
2. The physical is the only ontological category. 
3. It follows from 1 and 2 that consciousness must be physical.
4. It follows from 1, 2, and 3 that physical parameters, such as metabolic brain states, generate consciousness. 
5. Therefore, consciousness reduces to, or emerges from, the physical brain. 
6. Since 4 and 5 encounter the hard problem of consciousness, consciousness is instead a fundamental property of any physical system that integrates information. 

Constitutive panpsychism makes the same claims as physicalism up until it encounters the same hard problem of consciousness. It then makes the additional claim that, while the physical is the only category with ontic existence, consciousness is a fundamental property of the physical. Specifically, it leverages ideas like Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) to explain how consciousness emerges. 

Under this approach, if a physical system, down to the level of a proton (a system of integrated quarks), integrates information, it has a modicum of consciousness. As the complexity of a given system increases, those micro-consciousnesses combine. The human brain, as a highly complex information integrating system, combines enough micro-consciousnesses to generate our macro-consciousness. 

Like dualism, constitutive panpsychism avoids the hard problem of consciousness, but creates for itself a new challenge: the combination problem. 

The theory leverages complexity as the cause of the emergence of consciousness from the physical, but does not provide an empirical mechanism to explain how the micro-consciousnesses combine. Furthermore, while IIT gives us the “phi” threshold to mark at which point of complexity consciousness emerges (Tononi 2004; Koch 2018), constitutive panpsychism can’t explain why or how that threshold is the “magic moment” of emergence. 

Furthermore, to even in principle explain that magic moment, the theory relies on the idea that a sufficient difference in degree of consciousness leads to a difference in kind of consciousness. However, this would contradict the accepted definitions of phenomenal and meta-consciousness, which reflect a difference in degree but not in kind (both are still ontically mental).

Indeed, while there are differences of degree and kind in nature, the idea that sufficient differences in degree cause a difference in kind is a fallacious category error. Such a leap across categories (kinds) does not follow from a change in degree, which happens, by definition, within one category. But even if we granted that fallacy, then there would still remain the necessity of identifying at which new difference of degree the difference in kind occurs. 

Not only that, but a difference in kind only happens if we change what is being measured (Cesere 2014; Kastrup, Vervaeke, & Jaimungal 2021). For example, if I measure my weight now and then again a month in the future, and if I gain five pounds in that time, I have measured a difference of the degree of weight, but not a difference in kind.  

Similarly, the difference between phenomenal and meta-consciousness is in the degree of information processing. Reaching the “phi” threshold does not entail measuring something other than the level of information processing, and is therefore, by definition, not a difference in kind, but only one of degree. 

Such a classification is also consistent with Jung and depth psychology’s terminology of “consciousness” (corresponding to meta-consciousness), “psyche” (corresponding to phenomenal consciousness), and “unconscious” (corresponding to contents of the psyche not re-represented meta-cognitively). For Jung, consciousness “embraces … a whole scale of intensities of consciousness. Between ‘I do this’ and ‘I am conscious of doing this’ there is a world of difference … there is a consciousness in which unconsciousness predominates, as well as a consciousness in which self-consciousness predominates.” Here Jung explicitly states that”consciousness” and the “unconscious” are both psychic in nature, with no change in ontic category when shifting between them. Rather, they can impinge and imprint on each other precisely because their difference in degree is not a difference in kind (Jung 1991, 2001). 

In other words, the above approach is a hand-wave. It doesn’t provide a solution to the problem, but instead hides behind complexity. 

Yet another objection is that the empirical support for IIT has been entirely dependent on subjects’ ability to report their conscious experiences (Tononi 2004), which means “phi” measures meta-consciousness, not phenomenal consciousness. After all, you can’t report on an experience unless you know that you are having it, which is the definition of meta-consciousness (Kastrup, Vervaeke, & Jaimungal 2021). Put in depth psychology terms, “phi” measures the degree of re-representation of psychic contents, what Jung calls “consciousness” (Jung 1991, 2001). But this corresponds to meta-consciousness in modern philosophy, not to phenomenal consciousness.  

Once again, we see the epistemic challenge of studying phenomenal consciousness, which can only be directly accessed via introspection and not via reportability. Since introspection is not considered empirically acceptable in contemporary science, we encounter a blocker to our understanding of the mind. 

As a result, the panpsychist can not verify or falsify the positive claim that the physical exists outside of consciousness, since consciousness is epistemically fundamental. Furthermore, there is little empirical support for the notion that subatomic particles, which under quantum field theory don’t have ontic existence, have even a modicum consciousness.

In short, constitutive panpsychism is for physicalists who have given up on solving the hard problem, but wish to retain all of the other core claims of physicalism. 

Analytic idealism

Analytic idealism accounts for consciousness by making the following series of claims:

1. Consciousness exists.
2. Consciousness is the only ontic category, such that reality is mental.
3. It follows from 1 and 2 that the phenomenology of physicality is ontically mental. 
4. One natural substrate of consciousness splits off into many private minds, like ours. 
5. Dissociation is the mental mechanism by which both the phenomenology and the splitting off can be explained. 

Analytic idealism avoids the hard problem of consciousness by taking as metaphysically fundamental that which is epistemically fundamental: consciousness, itself. The claim of this metaphysics is that consciousness is the substrate of reality. Not your mind alone, not my mind alone, but a naturalistic, universal field of subjectivity. In that sense, analytic idealism is an objective idealist theory, with some subjective elements.

The fact that it chooses that which is epistemically fundamental is not, by itself, enough to give analytic idealism an advantage over other theories. It must also, like the rest of them, be able to explain reality, including our phenomenological experiences of the physical world and our private inner subjectivities.

That challenge takes the forms of what are often called the hard problem of matter and the decombination problem, respectively. The first is a question of how we derive physicality from mentality, the second question is about how one natural mind divides into many. 

To account for both, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, the mind behind analytic idealism, invokes the empirically known mechanism of dissociation, which cuts off certain mental contents from others (Kastrup 2019). 

Specifically, Harvard research on the dreams of patients with dissociative identity disorder (DID) revealed that, for 25% of subjects, the patient’s mind generated a dream world shared by the alters (alternate personalities). The alters had their own private subjectivity, could interact with each other, and perceived the dream world as physical. Of course, the dream world was mental, and the alters’ private subjectivities were actually dissociated complexes of the patient’s mind (Barrett 1994). 

As such, analytic idealism claims that dissociation provides a naturalistic, empirically known mechanism to resolve the decombination problem and the hard problem of matter. Therefore, claim 5 is necessary to make sense of claims 3 and 4.

Importantly, the first positive claim of analytic idealism can not only be verified, it is nature’s one given. Consciousness is our primary datum of existence, and thus to claim that it exists is trivial. Claim 2 is consistent with the virtues of conceptual parsimony and skepticism – invoking an ontic category outside consciousness, nature’s one given category, would be acceptable if one could not explain reality from consciousness, alone. The subsequent claims of the analytic idealist then propose to do just that. 

The result is that, so long as analytic idealism has sufficient empirical substantiation for its ability to explain reality, it does have an epistemic advantage over the other metaphysical options. Furthermore, physicalism, dualism, and constitutive panpsychism currently cannot point to an empirically known phenomenon to resolve the hard problem, interaction problem, and combination problem, respectively. By contrast, analytic idealism has such a candidate solution in dissociation. 

Analytic idealism is the only metaphysical theory that does not face the epistemic challenges at the root of the meta-problem of consciousness. Indeed, the paradoxes surrounding consciousness dissolve once we have an explanatorily powerful theory that also takes that which is epistemically fundamental as ontically fundamental.

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