The Hard Problem Solved

1100 words, 5 minute read

It is customary these days to refer to consciousness as ‘the Hard Problem’. Ok, I’ll grant you, it’s tricky. How is it that I seem to be aware of myself acting apart from my awareness of my action itself. Spooky!

Not that spooky. Turns out, the Hard Problem was solved more than 2500 years ago, or  if not solved, at least defined and modeled:

“Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separatedthe light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” (Genesis 1: 1(b) – 3)

But before that, we read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1: 1(a)) Some creator! He observed, he spoke, he allowed, he evaluated, he separated/gathered, and he labeled. He was more lab assistant than Nobel scientist, more Lucy, doing QC on the candy line, than DaVinci, painting his Mona Lisa.

But God’s unassuming manner gives us a model for human consciousness. Contrary to popular (and by ‘popular’ I mean universal) opinion, we are not conscious authors of our actions. Rather, we oversee, we permit, we judge, we aggregate and we differentiate.

No wonder we read, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them…” (Genesis 1: 27) We are chips off the ole block!

And say what you will, Genesis doesn’t skimp! Just in case we’re dense, which of course we are, it retells the story. And just like Grandpa (that’s me) at family gatherings, it tells the same story over and over again:

“And God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water’… and it was so. God called the vault ‘sky’… And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear’. And it was so. God called the dry ground ‘land’, and the gathered waters he called ‘seas’. And God saw that it was good.

“Then God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation’… and it was so… And God saw that it was good… And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night’. And it was so… and God saw that it was good.

“And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky’… And God saw that it was good… And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds… And it was so…and God saw that it was good.

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness… So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them… God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”

Get the point? Apparently not! Why else would we continue to refer to God as ‘almighty’ (omnipotentem) rather than ‘all-might-be’ (omnipotentia)?

Like our template, God, we act and we are conscious of our actions; but we do not act consciously. We break continuous activity (Herclitus) into distinct events (called ‘days’ in Genesis). We are conscious of our activity as a series of such events which we evaluate and imprint. We consciously review, and  condone or condemn, our actions and we project each imprint, and our conscious evaluation of it, into the Actual World of future events.

Our conscious evaluation of our actions is no more inert than God’s. Just as light and land and sea and sky became permanent features of the World, accompanied by God’s approbation, i.e. his positive prehension and favorable subjective form (Whitehead), so we tag our own actions with conscious judgment, and the objective future inherits bothour physical actions and our conceptual valuations of those actions. 

In another post on this site, Consciousness & Free Will, we explored in more detail our idea that actions may be voluntary, free, and value driven even if not preceded by conscious intent. According to this model, consciousness is an emergent property of events, not their prerequisite.

None of this is meant to compromise our responsibility, or our accountability, in any way. We are responsible for the actions we undertake voluntarily, even if unconsciously, and we are also responsible for the subjective form (valuation) we attach to those acts as we project them forward into future Actual Worlds.

Imagine you are playing the role of Hamlet on Broadway. Lucky you! Wally Shawn directing? You act the part of the Danish prince from curtain to curtain. Then, instead of getting drunk with the rest of the cast, you head home to write a review of the play for the New York Times.

You impact the future twice: once by the way you interpret and project Hamlet’s character on stage and then again by how you review your performance (and the rest of the production) for Times’ readers. The future of this Hamlet is a function of the quality of your acting and the tone of your writing.

Consciousness transforms action in the same way that quantum computing transforms data processing. Instead of a binary bit (+ or -), consciousness gives you qubits (+/+, +/-, -/+, or -/-): I act or I pass, I confirm or I condemn. Quantum computing power grows exponentially rather than arithmetically; consciousness gives a similar boost to the efficacy of my actions. Consciousness does not determine what I do; it amplifies (or dampens) it and ‘superjects’ the finished, evaluated product, ‘raw material’ for future events.

Genesis gives us a model of consciousness that avoids the usual pitfalls of mechanism, determinism, and dualism. It eliminates the problem of agency. Rather than emerging from a network of single celled organisms called neurons, consciousness envelopes physical process, observing, rationalizing, judging and projecting. Consciousness action is reaction!