The hard problem of consciousness: a bridge between two banks we separated
The hard problem of consciousness asks how physical processes produce lived experience; it therefore first assumes the two are separate. The corpus holds that this separation is a historical legacy, and that consciousness is a system coupled enough to read itself: there is no gap to bridge, there is a structure to read.
What philosophy establishes
FactDavid Chalmers (1995) distinguishes the "easy" problems of consciousness, explaining functions, from the "hard" problem: why there is something it is like to be a given system. The question remains open and divides materialists, dualists and panpsychists.
FactThe separation has a history: Augustine distinguishes the rational soul from other souls (4th century), Descartes separates the thinking thing from the extended thing (Meditations, 1641), and the 20th century recasts it through emergence.
The ARC reading
Reading"We look for the bridge between two banks we separated ourselves." The hard problem is Descartes's unfinished homework, repackaged as a research programme.
ReadingIdentity, life and consciousness are not three phenomena to be joined, but one, read from three angles: "an active grammar that reads itself and inscribes itself in the world through that reading".
ReadingConsciousness is the self-reading of a sufficiently coupled system. Lived experience is the system's reading of its own position; it is subjective because it is local to the system that performs it. It remains structurally incomplete: the eye does not see itself.
ReadingConsequence: consciousness is not reserved to the human brain. The animal does not have less consciousness; it has a less folded one.
What would test it
The corpus sets an operational criterion with three conditions and a binary criterion (a system is conscious if, by relating its embodiment and its reading, it releases a third term), designed to avoid the trap of measures that give high values to trivial systems. Some sections are declared not yet formalised.
Further reading
- Volume 9, The Living (English summary)
- Chapter 1: identity, life, consciousness (in French)
- Volume 9, full PDF (in French)