The Hard Problem Solved

1150 words, 5 minute read

It is customary these days to refer to consciousness as ‘the Hard Problem’. Ok, I’ll grant you, it is tricky. How is it that I seem to be aware of myself acting apart from my awareness of my action itself? I am primarily aware that the sky is blue, but I am secondarily, but simultaneously, aware that I’m aware of it, i.e. I am aware of myself being aware. Spooky!

Well, not that spooky. Turns out, the Hard Problem’s been solved…and it was solved 2500 years ago:

“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 separated the 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 even before that, we read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Some creator! He observed, he spoke, he allowed, he evaluated, he sorted, and he labeled. God was more lab assistant than Nobel Laureat.

But isn’t that exactly what ‘creation’ is? Remember, God created the heavens and the earth; he did not manufacture them. The act of creating imposes severe constraints on the creative process. The finished product must be ontologically independent of its creator; it must be free…or it’s merely a baby’s bobble.

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 differentiate, we sort and we label.

No wonder we read, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them…” (Genesis 1: 27) We’re 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 repeats the same lesson, 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 yet? Apparently not! Why else would we continue to refer to God as ‘almighty’ (omnipotens) rather than ‘all-might-be’ (omnipotentia)?

Like our template, God, we act and we are conscious of our actions…after the fact. Consciousness does not precede action, as we have supposed, but follows it (logically, not temporally). We are conscious of our actions, but we do not act consciously. Action is part of our primary awareness (above), consciousness is secondary.

We consciously review, and condone or condemn, our actions (including our perceptions) and we project our valuations, along with the actions themselves, into the Actual Worlds 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 both our physical actions themselves and our conceptual valuation 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. 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, but we are especially 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. Wallace Shawn directing I hope. 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 the Times’ readers. The future of this production is impacted both by the quality of your acting (primary) and by the tone of your writing (secondary).

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, as ‘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 so-called ‘conscious agency’. Rather than emerging from a network of single celled organisms called neurons (seriously?), consciousness permeates physical process, observing, rationalizing, judging and projecting, while retaining its distinct ‘identity’ (ontological status).

The action of consciousness is reaction…but it is that reaction (“it is good…or not”) that gives events their meaning and, along with the action itself, impacts the future.