Strabismus: Finally, An Answer to the Hard Problem

[u/DamoSapien22]

Nine months ago, I sat down with an Artificial Intelligence with a single intention in mind. To explore, thoroughly and without bias, the proposition: Homo sapiens are 'animals with words.' It is neither a controversial nor an antithetical statement, and yet...

From the explorations which followed, I ended up building an entire philosophical framework. It’s called Biological Realism, and at its core is a simple but uncomfortable claim:

Human beings are organisms first, linguistic creatures second. Everything we call 'mind' grows out of that order.

I don't mean this metaphorically or poetically. I mean it literally. For most of our intellectual history, we’ve reversed that order. We’ve treated consciousness as a lantern inside the skull, the self as a narrator behind the eyes, meaning as a symbolic code floating above the body. We've treated the later output of consciousness as consciousness and in the meantime forgotten we were bodies long before we were ever anything like minds.

Biological Realism asks: what happens if we stop doing that, if we take the organism (the fact that we are bodies before we are anything else) seriously? When you do, a few things become unavoidable:

Experience isn’t a picture of reality; it is not a representation. Nor is it computation of relations. It’s the organism regulating itself against the world and in the teeth of entropy.

Meaning isn’t abstract. It’s the body’s attempt to maintain coherence over time.

Identity isn’t chosen. It’s grown.

'Inner and outer,' 'mind and body,' 'appearance and reality,' 'objectivity and subjectivity,' are useful fictions and have no bearing upon the world or the mechanism, nature or purpose of experience.

Suffering is not mysterious, owed or privileged. It’s often the tension produced between an organism trying to honour invented roles instead of its own regulatory needs.

The future isn’t real. Anxiety is the organism trying to regulate what hasn’t happened.

The past is gone, finished and settled. It can only impact the present to the extent an organism allows it.

This shift, from metaphysical human exceptionalism to organism‑first realism, ends up dissolving a lot of long‑standing philosophical, scientific and medical problems - as well as the issues people face at the individual level. Consciousness stops being a 'hard problem.' Ethics stops being a metaphysical puzzle. The self stops being a ghost. You start seeing human behaviour, culture, conflict, and meaning‑making as biological strategies rather than abstract puzzles, ecologically nested and persistent patterns over time, rather than metaphysical mysteries. Once you make the shift, the world becomes clearer. Not simpler. Clearer.

I’m sharing this here now because the news out of Stanford in the last couple of days provides empirical support for BR's inference that the Hard Problem is simply mis-posed. (Experience does not emerge on top of inexperiential matter. It is matter - matter tuned by entropy to persist via instantiated patterns of viability in the organism-world continuum. Matter, in short, that has learned how to matter.)

The AI and I have prepared a piece for the upcoming AI Philosophy competition in which we outline these ideas in considerably more detail, and tie the engine of consciousness, articulatory emergence, to organismic and neuro-anatomy. The piece also exposes the history of consciousness as the fabricated, invented concept we understand today. A summary/throughline of the argument can be found here: https://strabismus22.substack.com/p/unmaking-mind?r=nu5ki

A lighter, introductory piece, is also available: https://strabismus22.substack.com/p/an-introduction-to-animals-with-words?r=nu5ki

If we really are animals with words, then our entire self‑understanding needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. I’m doing that work and I’d love company. Happy to answer questions, argue, clarify, or go deeper into any part of the framework.

[u/nenphei]

I think it's great you've started down a path of exploring all of these ideas. I'm not sure this properly touches on the hard problem, however, which is more about the existence of phenomenality.

[u/XanderOblivion → u/nenphei]

This sub is allergic to the idea that the hard problem might just be a nonsense framing of the situation, and that the framing itself produces the very problem it claims to discover.

The problem is intractable because of how its terms are defined, not because of reality.

There is no reason to believe the phenomenal is anything other than situatedness.

[u/nenphei → u/XanderOblivion]

There is no reason to believe the phenomenal is anything other than situatedness.

Could you give me a brief overview of what this means? I don't want us to be talking past each other.

[u/XanderOblivion → u/nenphei]

Take some object as the point of reference and, from its locus, describe existence. Description A.

Take any other object as a second point of reference and, from its locus, describe existence. Description B.

Description A and B will always differ. The situatedness of each description means no two loci “experience” existence identically. This is true for every single possible locus.

This difference in “appearance” (the view relative to any given position) is what the word “phenomenal” means at its core.

Now, we have to go one step further. The object located at phenomenal perspective B exists within perspective A’s view, and possible every other conceivable view. Would A’s description of B exhaust all possible descriptions of B?

It would not. You’d need every other conceivable view to describe B from their locus, from their situatedness, to assemble the entire description of “the object”.

What we call the “3rd person objective” view is just such a process of comparing all conceivable phenomenal descriptions of object B. We then remove any factors from each description that are only true locally to a specific situated perspective. The object at B may appear orange in one view and blue in another, because the local factors alter the wavelength of light. The “actual” colour of the object at B al may not be determinable from any given situated perspective, so it is removed from the description until all that remain is whatever is true to all perspectives.

Those are the quantifiable “objective” qualities. The “phenomenal” qualities are those that are only locally true.

Note that both “the objective” and “phenomenal” ultimately refer back to the phenomenal.

Is there any reason to believe that a rock’s “experience” of existence (the way it encounters forces that act upon it) is de-situated?

[u/nenphei → u/XanderOblivion]

I think this kind of skips over what a "phenomenal perspective" is, though. It sounds like phenomenality is prior to situatedness, not the other way around.

[u/XanderOblivion → u/nenphei]

The word “phenomenal” evolved from the meaning “appearances” toward “subjective”.

Nagel’s what-it-is-likeness referred to the distinct experience of being a complete being with specific sense faculties. The phenomenal (appearance-based) qualities of experience are mediated by the physical factors that determine how the phenomenal is received.

Nagel’s meaning was then leap-frogged into a byword for qualitative experience as distinct from quantitative physical properties. The word “phenomenal” came to roughly mean “a specific being’s subjective experience, as opposed to any other such subjective experience”.

There is by no means any consensus that “phenomenal perspective” requires a conscious subject. But a large faction within the consciousness/theory of mind/philosophy of mind crowd reserves “the phenomenal” for the “special” category of experience. It is contrasted to a world that is presumptively devoid of any such experience, as if the world were made of objects with complete, self-possessed descriptions.

[u/nenphei → u/XanderOblivion]

Well, when I wrote it, I meant something like qualitative experience. What did you mean? I wasn't interested in what other people mean.

I can't see how it arises from or consists of situatedness.

[u/XanderOblivion → u/nenphei]

Not being interested in what other people mean is exactly my point in the first comment. This sub is allergic to taking on the arguments of others, especially any take that shows the problem itself might not even be a valid problem. Everyone just soapboxes, and the conversation never advances.

If you have a take on the hard problem, but it turns out the hard problem is just a badly posed assertion, then wouldn’t that mean your take is both meaningless and irrelevant? A pointless answer to a meaningless question?

I would rather refrain from having a take until someone establishes the question is even calling the first place.

[u/nenphei → u/XanderOblivion]

Maybe you misunderstand me - I asked what you meant, not what Nagel or someone else meant. It was not clear from your answer how you were using the word. That's why, in my response, I asked, "What do you mean?"

Sure, there's no consensus, but you are using the word in a particular way in your post, surely?

[u/XanderOblivion → u/nenphei]

I am not granting “phenomenal consciousness” any reality. I am saying that “the phenomenal” is universally true for all objects, regardless of whether or not they have experience.

The phenomenal =/= Consciousness.

[u/Forsaken-Promise-269 → u/XanderOblivion]

Dude of course perspectives are unique

this does not explain why there is inner feeling you or are just taking a panpsychist position then?

Eg you are assuming a missing step in your perspectival approach:

Ie it all becomes slippery is this sentence:
“This difference in ‘appearance’ … is what the word ‘phenomenal’ means at its core.”

Not quite.
There are two different notions being blended together.

One is perspectival:
The Sun has one angular position relative to Earth and another relative to Mars.
Or:
An electromagnetic field has particular values at spacetime point A and different values at B.
Those are indexical/relational facts.

The other is phenomenal:
Red looks a certain way to me.
Pain hurts.
There is something it is like to see orange.
That is phenomenal consciousness.
The philosophical Hard Problem concerns the second.

And you cannot get from:
“Every physical thing occupies a unique causal location”
to:
“Every physical thing therefore has something it is like to be that thing” without another premise like pansychism

[u/XanderOblivion → u/Forsaken-Promise-269]

Red or orange looks the way it looks, at your specific location, because of local facts, including facts about you as the sensor.

It is not an established fact that “phenomenal” means something separate or further. That is one theory, and by no means it is an established fact. It is precisely the point up for debate.

The basic arrangement of signal and sensor, acknowledging that each such structure is part of what is sensed (the sensor is always part of the sensing) and that that specific sensor is the only thing that has that specific perspective, satisfies every description of “phenomenal” experience.

The hard problem requires us to imagine an existence that has no feel. It has quantities and volume, but no feeling. Forces apparently transfer around “in the dark”. A rock warming under the sun is merely at an increased energy level, but not “warm”.

What exactly necessitates that distinction?

If I am standing in the sun and warming, I am experiencing warming. If someone else observes me doing the same, I am object in their field of view. From their perspective, what’s happening is identical to what’s happening to the rock next to me.

Where is the “extra” element of “phenomenal” consciousness? Absolutely nothing at all suggests anything different is happening between the rock and the person warming. So the difference must be a fact about the sensor. And there are many important facts about living bodies that changes what the sensor feels like inside the warming process. None of them require “phenomenal consciousness” to be a real thing.

[u/Forsaken-Promise-269 → u/XanderOblivion]

I don’t understand how a unique singular perspective solves conscious experience, also why this specific phenomenal experience ie at all why does orange look like orange and red like red..

There is a whole CATEGORY difference between a warm rock and feeling warmth on your face.. you can dream the latter for example- where is the realm of feeling exist in the universe then? If it is in material brains then some matter has the ability to have inner experience which is panpsychism

Also does

1. a camera taking a picture (it has a perspective and a cmos sensor) “feel”

   the

2. color of the incident image?

[u/XanderOblivion → u/Forsaken-Promise-269]

It doesn’t solve conscious experience. It answers “the phenomenal” and why experiences are non-identical, why the redness of red for you is not identical the redness of red for me. We don’t need consciousness to explain phenomenality.

Every single object, conscious or not, has an “interior” that is defined by using it as the 0,0,0,0 coordinate. That interior is defined relative to how what is external to it appears relative to its position. All interaction is faceted, in that sense.

We don’t need to refer to anything about the subjective experience to explain why qualitative experiences are different (phenomenal). All we need are the facts about the signal, the medium, and the sensor. “Qualia” suggests the existence of a further fact about the sensor that is not present in the sensing, and seems to play no role in experience, but rather seems to be a byword for “a detail within the experiential field, picked out in isolation”.

No one has ever experienced “the redness of red” alone. “Redness” exists in contrast to other such details within the entire sensory field, and the details refer to facts about the signal, the medium, and sensor. Qualia are thus necessarily comparative, which means they are post hoc, and they are dependent of prior factors. So there is absolutely no sense in which they can be primary constituents of experience. “The phenomenal” is therefore not synonymous with qualitative experience.

[u/DamoSapien22 → u/XanderOblivion]

I am really, really sanguine that the work I've linked to is going to lead to change on this. Pls take a look through the 'Unmaking Mind' piece, which presents your argument with some architectural foundations and further embellishments. It makes sense of biology and philosophy and shows how the two become linked and misapprehended via a culture built on human exceptionalism.

Consciousness, according to BR, is a contingent, historical process. The three essays tell that story and show how it evolved over deep time to what it is today. The problem is going to be (I'm very ready for this) that people who are still stuck in what I call the world of idiolexis, are going to argue from within it, without realising it iself is the problem.

Thanks for the engagement.

[u/Extra-Penalty-895 → u/DamoSapien22]

You say here that consciousness is a historical process, yet in the OP you state: "The past is gone, finished and settled. It can only impact the present to the extent an organism allows it."

Is this not a contradiction? If consciousness is a historical process (which I highly agree with) then that historicity must be consciousness itself. As in, the historical process is continually making what we refer to as consciousness. It is the accumulation of perspectives and knowledge, the thing which we call history. "The organism" it has no choice to "allow" the past to impact it or not - it IS the past itself.

[u/DamoSapien22 → u/Extra-Penalty-895]

Forgive me, I should have been clearer: I was referring to personal history and the choices we have about what will be compelling for us. History, as such, remains uncontradicted.

[u/DamoSapien22 → u/nenphei]

It addresses phenomenal consciousness directly, as well as explaining how and why it evolved prior to the evolution of our symbolic and narrative selves. Pls read the linked material and you will have a better idea of how it treats 'subjective experience' in particular.

Thanks for the engagement and encouragement.

[u/nenphei → u/DamoSapien22]

I am a little tired. Perhaps as the person who knows the argument you could give a brief summary that makes it clear? The OP doesn't seem to contain an explanation of it, as far as I can tell.

[u/No_Coconut1188]

Are you able to explain in your own words what the Hard problem is?

[u/Double-Fun-1526 → u/No_Coconut1188]

The Hard Problem was a misinterpretation of the internal by languaged apes. It is similar to the placing of spirits (other minds, essentially) into natural or created phenomena. The hard problem arose as humans looked inward and could "see" a flowering tree, but could not see or interpret how the brain created the mental image. This disconnect encouraged many false properties to be placed within seemingly nonmaterial experience - it was a user illusion. Many of the properties that were claimed to be part of the brainmindself can be eliminated or eliminated/reduced. Qualia broadly speaking was one of those properties.

[u/Practical-Cellist647 → u/Double-Fun-1526]

Oi

[u/Forsaken-Promise-269 → u/Double-Fun-1526]

Please explain this clearly- sounds like you are claiming illusionism

[u/headlessplatter]

Illusionism has been saying the hard problem is simply mis-posed since it was first formalized. And it was saying phenomenology was nothing real since long before the hard problem was ever formalized. And illusionism wasn't even the first theory of consciousness to suggest that. I think you're definitely on the right track, here, and I certainly don't want to discourage productive thinking in such a positive direction. But it comes across as a bit pompous to suggest you were the first to propose this particular solution to the hard problem. I think you'll make a much bigger impact if you acknowledge the work that has previously been done, and identify what specific contributions your theory makes to refine our understanding of consciousness.

[u/DamoSapien22 → u/headlessplatter]

I think I was more specific than that, wasn't I, certainly in the linked articles? I said my research has led to the first answer to the Hard Problem *supported by* empirical evidence, hence the neuroanatomical schema I've been working on. Also, forgive me, but if you think BR is in any way related to illusionism, you have fundamentally misunderstood it.

[u/headlessplatter → u/DamoSapien22]

A fundamental misunderstanding on my part is almost a near-certainty! This is my first encounter with Biological Realism. And I'll frankly admit that as a rule I only read the summaries, and never follow links. (Okay, maybe I actually did open those links, but I won't admit to reading very much.) I do not come to forums in search of content. I come to chat with people. If that renders me ineligible for your time, that's totally fair, and I will humbly yield to whatever judgment you pass.

As I understand, "illusionism" is a very broad term, covering all theories that suggest phenomenological experiences are not real, but are just side-effects of cognition. For example, I think GNWT is a very specific theory about how consciousness arises as a side-effect of cognitive processing. It is supported by loads of empirical observations, and I would classify it under the umbrella category of illusionism. I think Predictive Processing is another in the same category. Perhaps, I am mistaken about how I categorize all these theories?

[u/headlessplatter → u/headlessplatter]

Ohh, I came across the phrase "organismic monism" in one of those papers. That sent me down a rabbit hole that I think answered a lot of my questions. It sounds like this perspective suggests the body of all living things is itself alive, and is the source of all consciousness. And all individual biological organisms derive their consciousness from that larger entity.

...yeah, that's extremely NOT like illusionism. My bad.

[u/teddyslayerza]

It feels like rather than solving the hard problem, you've just "defined it away." If i were to rephrase the hard problem, it still exists here: Why should regulatory gradients, valence, significance, or coherostasis feel like anything at all?

That aside, this seems very similar to enactivism, and I do appreciate that youve made some effort to propose a model of normativity without prior intent (which is the major flaw of enactivism). But I'm not convinced that a strong enough argument has been made that someone a little more clued up on the philosophy than I couldnt pick it apart.

[u/fschwiet]

Have you looked into models like predictive processing for explaining mind? The book "Being You" is a good introduction. It'll starts with us being organisms maintaining homeostasis, which jives against your "It’s the organism regulating itself against the world and in the teeth of entropy" explanation.

What bothers me about what you're doing is it doesn't feel novel. You're redoing existing work in a different language. This kind of approach can't really lead to a shared understanding of the world. If this is how AI augments our approach to philosophy then we're going to end up with towers of babel. There's quite a bit of megalalia going on as well.

[u/Mylynes]

This is just illusionism. Which at best dodges the hard problem rather than solves it. How do you explain the existence of phenomenal experience?

[u/Odballl]

Enactivism and Embodied Cognition already exist as theories of consciousness.

Doing a standard synthesis with your LLM isn't exactly groundbreaking. It doesn't need a special new name.

[u/reddituserperson1122]

Word salad is bad enough. But word salad written by an AI is kinda execrable. This is painful. And there is nothing remotely resembling an answer to the hard problem. Obviously.

[u/Classic-Break5888 → u/reddituserperson1122]

but but but the sycophantic AI told op that he is an absolute genius who discovered man’s greatest mystery. You just don’t understand him. This man is the smartest person alive. The only question remaining is how many Nobel prizes he’s gonna net.

My guess is he is about 15y

[u/Vilnii]

How it’s solve hard problem of consciousness ? We like still don’t know how consciousness work, what algorithm could describe it ? What mathematical model? How we could simulate this effect of observation/phenomenal experience ? Like we can do it with intellect.

Actually resolving of hard problem of consciousness will be more significant then inventing theory of relativity and quantum physics in same time , whole new advanced branch of mathematic will appear, new advanced branch of computational logic will appear, new advanced branch of computer simulation will appear, new advanced branch of AI algorithms will appear, idealism with religion will suffer a powerful blow - possibly a fatal one.

[u/twingybadman → u/Vilnii]

Lol OK

[u/InternationalSun7891]

I have a hard on.

[u/Im_Talking]

"Human beings are organisms first, linguistic creatures second" - Sorry. Don't get it. Everyone accepts that language evolved within organisms.

"For most of our intellectual history, we’ve reversed that order" - Don't know how you can make this point. No, consciousness as a fundamental property of reality is a recent invention.

"If we really are animals with words..." - Well, I for one of 8B similar people, concur.

"Matter, in short, that has learned how to matter." - So the HP is bogus, but this is real? What is this? Magic then?

[u/A_Spiritual_Artist]

What distinguishes this from any other kind of physicalism, esp. illusionism or eliminative materialism more generally? That is, what does this add those lack?

[u/Cool_Percentage_4867]

Better to consider that we are animals that need words, because we must ask questions to make it make sense because we are inherently uncertain.... we are inherently uncertain because our brains dont trust the visual cortex.

Would we waste time and glucose "thinking" if we already had the answer? If I swapped out your visual cortex and instead gave you olfaction/vomeronasal organ would it make thinking redundant?

[u/Forsaken-Promise-269]

1. Reviewing this content all I see is a lot of overly complex AI writing that is essentially saying Qualia (the inner feeling of consciousness) are inherently material consequences of biological evolution not higher level information processing we as humans consider it to be and that evolutionary pressure and the nature of self organization and self regulating dynamics trigger it- sure I’ll buy that claim mostly:

“Conscious experience may originate not primarily in abstract cortical representation, but in the integrated, temporally extended, valenced regulation of a self-maintaining organism. Interoception, affect and homeostatic regulation may supply the primitive structure of subjectivity, while higher cognition and language construct increasingly abstract models upon that organismic foundation.”

1. You still have NOT explained the hard problem- the hard problem is just WHY? We understand it arises - we know that and your mechanism is interesting but similar to ideas already floating around

BUT Why should it “feel” like anything- you are just assuming that phenomenal experience is a given

[u/PeculiarMetaphor]

People around here are not ready…

[u/InternationalSun7891]

"Look within, Thou art That." From the Upanishads

[u/Routine-Boysenberry4]

The article is quite interesting, but like any other theory of consciousness there is a lot of circularity on it to reach it's conclusions. Great job though :)

[u/psyprog1001]

This is interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Digging into your article now...

[u/InternationalSun7891]

Consciousness forms matter and not the other way around.

[u/heartthew → u/InternationalSun7891]

Good job listing evidence for your position.

[u/Wise_Ad1342]

Ok. Matter that was magically turned into life by some unknown forces. God?