At a conference on consciousness studies in Tucson in 1994, David Chalmers proposed a distinction that has since structured the entire discussion on consciousness. On the one hand, there are the "easy problems": how the brain processes information, controls attention, and compiles internal reports of its states. These are difficult but, in principle, solvable by neuroscience and computational science methods.
On the other hand, there is the "hard problem": why do these physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience, the inner feeling of "what it is like"? Why do we have consciousness at all, rather than just unconscious information processing? Over thirty years, this question has transformed from a niche philosophical debate into the central mystery of cognitive science. But now, as the number of its critics grows among philosophers and neuroscientists, a more compelling argument is emerging: the very formulation of the problem relies on a perceptual error.
Chalmers's argument seemed irrefutable. Even if we fully explained the neural correlates of any mental phenomenon—how the brain tracks objects, integrates information, produces speech—a gap would remain: why does it give me something? Why is red precisely that shade of red?
The zombie argument and the Mary's room thought experiment reinforced the belief that a physically identical system could remain completely unconscious. However, critics, starting with Daniel Dennett, point to a more subtle point: introspection is a fundamentally unreliable source. The brain does not produce something like an internal theater where all experiences perform for a central observer. Reports of one's sensations arise from numerous parallel processing streams, subject to memory distortions, attention errors, and systematic illusions.
A group of philosophers, calling themselves illusionists, go further: qualia—qualitative experiences, supposedly irreducible to physics—simply do not exist as fundamental properties. What we call the redness of a tomato is not a special magical property, but a complex bundle of functional operations: the system evaluates the object, produces an internal report about the evaluation, and this report becomes globally available in the brain. Due to the imperfection of introspection, it seems to us that in addition to all these processes, there is something else—some elusive quality of experience. In reality, it is merely a crudely distorted reflection of the processes themselves.
Keith Frankish and his colleagues, relying on the logic of physicalism, conclude: if qualia do not exist as independent properties, then the "hard problem" simply dissolves. Only engineering tasks remain—to reproduce the same functions in a machine, to check for the presence of the necessary behavioral and brain activation markers.
The logical core of Chalmers's objection is the conceivability argument: if we can conceive of a zombie (a physically identical being without subjective experience) without logical contradiction, then physical facts cannot entail phenomenal facts.
Opponents counter differently: our inability to imagine complete identity reflects merely the incompleteness of our understanding of the physiology of consciousness at this moment, not an ontological chasm between the world and experience. At the empirical level, no tool—neither functional magnetic resonance imaging nor metacognition tests—can directly measure the "feeling from within"; all data always pertain only to neural correlates, behavior, and verbal reports.
The very fact that we can only study consciousness indirectly may signify not its fundamental transcendence, but simply a methodological limitation inherent in third-person observation.
Imagine a complex assembly line: each station performs its role, signals circulate through the network, and results are processed in parallel. No one looks for an "additional organizing spirit" beyond the work of this machine. Similarly, subjective experience may simply be the integrated result of distributed computation that the system describes to itself. When the self-description is sufficiently detailed and becomes available to multiple processes in the brain, an illusion arises: it seems as if there is a central observer seeing everything "from the inside." In reality, it is merely a multi-layered report of one system about itself, mistakenly interpreted as evidence of something beyond the physical.
For research in artificial intelligence and theoretical transhumanism, this reinterpretation changes priorities. Instead of chasing the elusive "feeling" and testing for its presence, scientists can focus on the real engineering goal: reproducing the same functional organization and verifying the necessary behavioral and brain activity markers. In the clinic, it removes the temptation to attribute deep hidden consciousness to patients in a coma when only complex reflexive reactions are evident.
The question of whether a machine or an animal is conscious ceases to be pure metaphysics and becomes a concrete empirical and ethical calculation: what specific integrated functions and what forms of self-reflection are we prepared to consider sufficient evidence of consciousness?
Abandoning the "hard problem" as an independent entity does not simplify understanding, but rather shifts it to a more concrete, operational basis. Instead of speculating about why consciousness is possible at all, researchers are given the task: to precisely define and reproduce the mechanisms of self-monitoring, integration, and global information availability, and to understand how the brain mistakenly interprets its own processes as qualitative experiences. This makes the debate about the nature of consciousness less philosophically hopeless and more scientifically fruitful.
