The hard problem of consciousness, as formulated by David Chalmers, asks why and how physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. Why, for example, should the physical activity involved in hearing a musical note be accompanied by the experience of hearing it? The question is legitimate within its own terms, but those terms deserve examination. Describing the physical processes involved in hearing and describing what hearing feels like are different activities. The difficulty begins when that difference in description is treated as an explanatory gap that reality itself must somehow bridge. The distinction is useful, but its usefulness does not establish that reality is divided accordingly.
Begin instead with the relation. Imagine listening to a familiar melody played on a piano. One note arrives a fraction of a second later than expected. You recognise the delay because the preceding notes have established a rhythm and an expectation of what comes next. The momentary absence of the expected note changes how you experience its eventual arrival. What you hear takes shape through sound, memory, anticipation and the history of your listening. These same relations establish your standpoint as a listener. The distinction between the listener and the music arises within the encounter. Neither can be understood independently of the relations through which the experience takes shape. Experience is not something subsequently added to those relations. It is an expression of their activity.
I can attend to my own experience, and the act of attending becomes part of what there is to experience. Turn my attention to that act and the position from which I am observing has shifted again. This incompleteness is constitutive. A point of view depends upon a difference between what appears and the position from which it appears. Consciousness is one way the world becomes available to itself from within, through a living body with a particular history. The observer cannot be extracted from the relations through which observation occurs, then reintroduced as an independent explanation of them. There is no standpoint outside the encounter from which its entirety becomes available. The apparent separation between experience and its physical conditions is a consequence of how we describe them, not evidence that they exist independently.
The question of free will makes much the same mistake. It puts the chooser on one side and the conditions of the choice on the other, then asks which is in charge. Consider making a promise. I make that promise in a language I inherited, under circumstances I did not independently create. Yet the promise changes what another person can expect of me and what each of us is likely to do next. My action changes the conditions within which subsequent actions become possible. Agency is this capacity to alter what becomes possible through the same relations that make action possible in the first place. The conventional opposition between freedom and determination mistakes this activity for a property an isolated individual either possesses or lacks. Neither freedom nor determination independently describes what is happening. The apparent opposition arises from the distinction through which the question was constructed.
Scholastic argument has found a use for the hard problem. A proposed answer invites a rebuttal, the rebuttal gives the next paper a familiar place to begin, and the distinction on which they depend acquires another set of citations. Careers take shape around the question, and the work done in those careers keeps it available to be asked again. This does not make the scholarship worthless, nor does it mean that every question concerning consciousness is mistaken. It means that the persistence of a philosophical problem is not evidence of its necessity. The hard problem is sustained partly by the intellectual machinery assembled to resolve it. It becomes self-propagating. The question is no longer simply how consciousness arises, but whether the supposed difficulty was introduced by the terms in which we chose to investigate it. Even this objection gives the problem another outing. There is probably a conference in that.
References
Chalmers, D.J. (1995) ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), pp. 200–219.
Chalmers, D.J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
