Prerequisites

A comprehensive internalization of The Simple Model of Physics and Consciousness is required to grapple with these problems.

Introduction

Here we review the “Hard Problems” of consciousness from the perspective of the Simple Model of Physics and Consciousness. Once you have that, these questions snap into place, essentially trivial.

#1 Qualia -

The first and main hard problem is why is there subjective experience, qualia, at all. Why isn’t consciousness “quiet” like digestion or like a complicated machine humming along quietly? How is it that we have the experince of seeing this room, or smelling a rose, or tasting chocolate?

In the SMPC we understand consciousness as a self-reflective, self-awareness, and self-integrated modeling in the perpetual now. This forms qualia, as the synchronicity of senses, perception, modeling and memory activation in the NOW.

#2 - Mary’s Room -

Mary knows all physical facts about color but has never seen color. When she sees red, does she learn something new—what red feels like—suggesting consciousness isn’t fully physical?

The problem here is that you cannot “know” or gain sensory experience “from a book” so to speak. When the photons of light carrying the color red hit your retinas, stimulating nerve impulses that travel back to your brain, at that time you will have a different experience, and a different form of knowledge than you get from reading about color in a book. To take this a bit further, lets substitute biting a Carolina Reaper pepper with the color red. You can know and think all you want about hot peppers, but the actual bio-chemical sensory experience that occurs throughout your brain and body during the 10 minutes while and after you eat the pepper are not something you can “know” outside of the experience. And the experience occurs in the sensory perceptions frame by frame in the perpetual now of the activity.

So the answer here is YES, Mary learns something new when the actual red photons travel down here optic nerve and are perceived by her brain. And YES, this is fully physical.

#3 - The Chinese Room

A computation system can manipulate symbols perfectly (like Chinese characters) without understanding their meaning. There is a “huge algorithm” (hey, an LLM) that takes input and produces output at an extremely large scale of complexity. Is it conscious?

Here I would say that if the algorithm is mapped to sensory inputs of the world, that perceives, remembers, models, plans, has goals and has preferences and is robustly self-referentially aware then YES that would be functionally conscious.

If it is just a very well designed algorithm without that, then NO, it is not.

In some sense here, though, there appear to be degrees and variance in the “levels” of consciousness. When I was fully sedated for a minor surgery I was not conscious. When I am super groggy in the morning I am not very conscious. When I’m intensely engaged in self-awareness and the now experience I can feel very conscious. But I can also be in a flow state where I’m performing virtuously but not very conscious.

So, overall, we can’t give a binary response to the question if the Chinese room is conscious. It depends on the implementation, nature and details of the algorithm implemented within it.

#4 - The Explanatory Gap

Why does a complete physical account of pain/color/emotions still feel incomplete?

This is very similar to Mary’s room. When this question is placed into the context of a UIP/URE perpetual “now” state with sensory observation, memory and self-modeling (etc) it no longer feels incomplete.

#5 - The Problem of Personal Identity (“Why Am I Me?”)

Why am I experiencing this life, from this perspective? Physics can explain why this body exists—but not why consciousness is attached to this particular viewpoint rather than another (or none at all).

If you start from the perspective of consciousness as primary, then this question is unanswerable. Why does it attach to this body and not that? Unanswerable.

But if you start from the perspective as secondary to, and emerging from a biological brain, then it becomes trivial. It is equivalent to “why is this elbow attached to this body?” A long time ago, an embryo was formed and then a baby was born with a body and a brain. And from that baby, both an elbow, and a conscious experience came to be. That babies conscious experience grew and observed and had experiences, forming the “me”. Of course, an elbow doesn’t have an an experience and a brain does. As soon as you “flip the paradigm” and see consciousness as primary the problem reemerges with a vengance. But when you see consciousness as fully dependent on and emergent from a biological brain in a biological body, the question resolves.

Imagine a beautiful city park with 10 identical fountains. Each fountain is spraying water in the air, forming a beautiful water fountain. The spray of water can say, “hmm, why am I attached to this fountain and not that one?” But this is an incorrect paradigm. They spray of water emerges from the fountain fixtures. If the water for that fountain is turned off the spray disappears.

#6 - The Combination Problem

If everything has experience, how do experiences combine? If basic particles have proto-experience, how do they merge into a single unified human consciousness rather than many fragments?

Basic particles do not have the emergent complexity of the human brain; there is less “stuff” there to mediate the experience from UIP to UIP and so (for example) a rock has no experience. Existence, YES, but experience, NO. It’s essentially like asking “why can’t I watch a movie on a rock” or answer the phone with a stick?

#7 - Philosophical Zombies

Could something behave exactly like you without experience? If a perfect physical duplicate lacks inner experience, then consciousness isn’t logically entailed by physical facts.

This is your problem, not mine. Please explain to me how your zombie is able to sit across from me over a cup of coffee and share a normal conversation with me without consciousness.

#8 - The Unity of Consciousness

Why is experience unified rather than fragmented? Vision, sound, memory, and emotion are processed separately—yet appear as one coherent experience. Why?

Ah this is a great question. YES as we hear music for example, vibration by vibration from UIP to UIP, we don’t experience “vibration” we experience “music”. HOW?? Well, I know this might seem hand-wavy, but your subconscious is doing the heavy lifting here. And it’s true. Music is not “real”. Sound vibrations are real. But raw sound vibrations aren’t as meaningful and helpful to you overall as words or music are. So your subconscious brain converts the sound vibrations into higher order information that is more “palatable” for your brain, for you, for your emergent states UIP to UIP. The brain has evolved to be amazing and wonderful. It does this all over the place. In some sense, we can say none of our experience is real, because each individual UIP is far to small to be independently seen, observed or experienced. But our brain and by extension our conscious experience has been optimized to “live” at a biologically “reasonable” level. And by the way, I think that this “level” can vary. For example, when we are being attacked by a wild animal time will “slow down”. And young gamers have unbelievable ability to perceive and react in fast moving states. They’re so twitchy!

#9 - The Problem of Intentionality

How do mental states become about things? How does a thought refer to Paris, justice, or tomorrow—rather than being just neural activity?

Essentially this is EVERYTHING your brain is doing. You’re never able to experience anything as it is, the UIPs move far too fast, and atoms and molecules are far to small. Instead we operate at a “reasonable” level with concepts we can work with and live with, and that make sense for our biologically evolved selves. You need to be able to identify tigers and people and friends and enemies and rocks. An individual blade of grass or a hum of a bee isn’t usually relevant, nor is a microsecond state change in a water molecule. So in that sense, your brain, your subconscious is Platonizing, normalizing EVERYTHING. I think this question is more of a misunderstanding of this fact, than an accurate question.