A Scientific Perspective on the Hard Problem of Consciousness

The Hard Problem of consciousness, widely known as formulated by David Chalmers in the introduction to his book [1] (1996, p. xiii), can be articulated as follows. Our attribution of first-person experience to people based on observations and physical measurements is arbitrary and subjective. In principle, their actual experiences could be different, or not present, or present in only 50% of all cases, etc., with no consequences for any physical measurement. Therefore, the two questions: "How does a physical object, e.g., a brain, look to a researcher" and "How does it feel itself", are not reducible to each other and must have separate answers. On the other hand, because subjective experience is not a topic of modern natural science, arguing about its lack of understanding within the present scientific framework is difficult. In this work we explain how subjective experience can be property introduced into natural science, and the Hard Problem can be resolved, in exact analogy with the previous developments of science. The steps include the following. (1) Accept as an axiom that there are irreducible subjective experiences, which are directly observable by the subject via experiences of experiences. (2) Develop an empirical science of subjective experiences based on experiments, logic and parsimony, starting with a new metric system (one candidate for which is a semantic cognitive map: [2]) introduced together with related measuring techniques and a common language: agreed-upon labels to communicate results. (3) Connect the science of experiences with the traditional empirical science by establishing neural correlates of experiences. As we show, step (3) cannot be done before steps (1) and (2). We anticipate that our approach can be used to authenticate subjective experience (i.e., consciousness) in future artificial general intelligence systems, based on the established correlates.