A lot of times when we have a problem we tend to go and search for a solution for our problem instead of understanding what caused the problem to exist in the first place.


Whenever I come across the hard problem of consciousness I always have a problem in even understanding it. I understand that the dilemma is trying to understand how the how the qualities of consciousness that are experienced by living things may arise from out of inanimate matter which possesses no inherent qualities in and of itself; outside of our subjective perceptions.


I read all of Bernardo Kastrup's books where he lays out his theory of ''Metaphysical Idealism'' and I'm familiar with the materialist worldview of how consciousness might have arised form complex neural processes of the brain. The problem with both is that both theories require a form of emergence for them to exist and then the question might be at what point would this emergence happen? What is the criteria that those mental/matter processes have to meet in order for it to happen? Where do you draw the line that now there is mind or now there is matter? not to mention if the concept of time even applies here since in the idealist worldview time and space are what allow representations (matter) to happen so when when you talk about Universal Consciousness you can't bring time into the equation because it's outside of the whole spacetime dimensionality.


I tend to think of Whitehead's Process-ontology as the best way to explain reality, because the nature of reality is not made of properties whether physical or mental at least you can never posit that it is, because if you did this isn't parsimonious and it'll always be a postulate that cannot be proved. It's like saying I'm experiencing the world without the concept of an experience, our reality is made of processes where by the past is inherited into the present and perishes into the future so that there's a temporalization of terms which in a substance ontology are static and self existent, rather than matter and mind being separate substances, mind and matter are different phases of the same process.


So eventually if we were to say that mind and matter are one of the same thing, two phases of the same process we won't only solve the hard problem but we diminish its existence in the first place.

What does everyone else think? Have we invented the hard problem of consciousness?