The 3 body problem of consciousness
Why the nature of consciousness is so difficult to pin down
“For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness, like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.”
— Alan Lightman —
There is something in our minds that defies explanation. A flicker of awareness. A sense of being. An insight that seems to reach beyond the simple firing of neurons, or the mere calculations of a computer or machine. This ineffable quality is what we understand as consciousness and has been the topic of extensive investigations, experimentations, analyses, and debates among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for as long as we have been… well… conscious.
We are still wresting with this problem and there is still no consensus on exactly what needs to be studied, never mind how, or even if consciousness can be considered a scientific concept. In some explanations, it is synonymous with mind, while in others it is considered an aspect of it. Some consider consciousness to mean our inner life — the world of introspection, private thought, imagination, and volition. Others think of consciousness as any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception — a sense of awareness, an awareness of awareness, a self-awareness — or a metacognition that can be either continuously changing or static.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what David Chalmers called the hard problem of consciousness; the question of how subjective, phenomenological experiences can emerge from purely physical matter and processes.
Understanding consciousness is complex and multifaceted. There are so many aspects of the mind that could be considered conscious, with each requiring us to consider a range of different phenomena that each require a distinct approach to accurately explain and model it, and each a set of questions which influences the kind of answers that are possible and meaningful!
At a broad level, these questions can be organised into three principal categories: the what, the how, and the why.
What is Consciousness?
When we ask what consciousness is, it can feel both simple and impossible to define. It is at once the very fabric of our experience while simultaneously becoming ephemeral the moment we try to define it. We intuitively understand that consciousness takes many different forms. Sometimes it is an immediate, raw experience, what is called phenomenal or qualitative consciousness. At other times, consciousness is reflexive, turning inwards through a sense of self-observation, reflection, and contemplation. And then there is narrative consciousness, the kind where we weave moments into the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives.
When we look at consciousness through all of these different lenses, a pattern starts to emerge. One where we intuitively understand that consciousness has a felt quality. The redness of a rose, the bitterness of coffee, the subtle melody in a poem. These raw sensations central to our experience, what are collectively called qualia, unfold in time and space. And as it does, so too does the structure of consciousness unfold, populating our experiential time and space with objects, events, and a persistent sense of ourselves acting in the world.
It is this unfolding and filling in that shapes the architecture of everyday life with each experience simultaneously an objective phenomenon and a subjective experience. Every interaction and encounter is perceived and experienced by someone, from somewhere, at some time. And since no one can fully inhabit another person’s consciousness, each experience must by definition be unique. It is this that gives consciousness a certain point of view that is so robust, it can even exist independently from a fixed self. But despite some form of self-orientation being necessary, consciousness is at the same time also profoundly integrative. Sensory impressions, thoughts, emotions, and memories do not appear as isolated fragments but as interwoven into unified moments, operating both locally within a single scene but also across space and time, weaving together the continuous flow of lived experience.
Conscious states are also directed; they are about things, reaching toward objects, ideas, and the world itself. We perceive and understand without noticing the machinery of thought or perception. It immerses us in meaning, reflecting both what we experience as well as how we represent it. It flows and it unfolds through time. It is shaped by what has come before, and it is oriented toward what is yet to come. It organises itself, it adapts, and it enables us to act, plan, and interpret. Consciousness is fundamentally an active, coherent, and responsive process, a living stream in which we are both observer and creator, witness and participant.
How Does Consciousness Exist?
Asking how consciousness came to exist, the question of origin, opens entirely new dimensions of thought and possibility. Does consciousness emerge from processes that are themselves not conscious, or is it a fundamental, irreducible feature of reality? Can it arise from neurons, from biological or physical structures, potentially even arising within complex patterns of computation? Or is it something that exists at the very foundation of the universe, and from which matter and reality emerge?
Each of these questions approaches the mystery of consciousness, this cluster of intertwined notions and ideas, from a slightly different angle. Should our approach attempt to explain the mechanisms of consciousness, attempting to replicate the dynamics of attention in artificial systems? Or should we try to map the qualities of experience in the redness of a rose, the warmth of a melody, the sensation of a touch, or onto the workings of the brain? Or should we focus on its flow, its subjectivity, its unity, and how consciousness shapes not only what we discover but also how we can understand it? It is this conundrum, this persistent challenge known to philosophers as the explanatory gap, that has been splitting scientists and philosophers into two distinct camps: those that are reductionist and those that are emergent or holist.
On the one side we have the Ockham’s Razor crowd that interprets a complex system as the sum of its parts; reductionist strategies that attempt to explain consciousness by tracing it back to its fundamental properties, physical or neural foundations, and connecting the higher-level experiences to lower-level processes. Some dimensions of consciousness are simply easier to approach than others. We can describe correlations, noting how neural patterns shift alongside conscious states. Attention, perception, and functional organisation can be studied, modelled, and perhaps even replicated. And the hard problem, understanding the emergence of subjective experience itself, is merely a limitation of our current scientific tools, with optimistic physicalists hoping that advances in neuroscience, computation, or perhaps even quantum models of brain function, may gradually illuminate the path.
On the other side of the argument, we find the antireductionists that come from the point of view that understanding a system can be done only as a whole. Karl Popper, a famous proponent of antireductionism, illustrates the need for a more holistic view in his essay Of Clouds and Clocks, where he classified phenomena into two types: “clock” phenomena with a mechanical basis and “cloud” phenomena which are indivisible and depend upon emergence for explanation, famously claiming that “materialist explanation of consciousness is not possible.” Proponents of emergence and holism are drawn toward the conclusion that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, accepting that experiences, mental states, and phenomenology may not be fully deducible from physical facts — even when they are realised through them. They see these enduring gaps as evidence that consciousness may exist at the very heart of existence itself, at its heart both irreducible and primary.
Colin McGinn goes so far as to suggest that our inability to understand consciousness may be a fundamental boundary of human understanding, a limit woven into the very architecture of our minds, and that consciousness. In this sense, it may be like many other complex, emergent phenomena arising from simpler interactions, yet revealing patterns and behaviours that cannot be fully predicted from their parts.
In exploring how consciousness arises, we are not only tracing neural circuits or cognitive mechanisms. We are also confronted with, and confronted by, the limits of our understanding! Opening ourselves to the possibility that consciousness may be both the deepest mystery, and the deepest reality we inhabit, the hard problem remains profoundly challenging. But it does seem to hint toward the notion that consciousness is a fundamental, basic property of reality, and not something reducible to physical processes alone. (A theme that lies at the very foundation of my work and which will be discussed in great detail in other essays, my books, and ebooks!)
Why Does Consciousness Exist?
At the core of this question lies another one: does consciousness actually do anything? If consciousness evolved as a feature of complex biological systems, then it must do something useful, at least biologically speaking, right?
Some views, like epiphenomenalism, say it doesn’t. On this account, conscious experience is causally inert. It never acts, only watches, like a kind of mental ghost that is present, but powerless. According to proponents such as Rene Descartes and Thomas Henry Huxley, subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body, but do not themselves influence physical events. The appearance that subjective mental states such as thoughts and intentions are causally effective themselves and directly influence physical events is an illusion generated by the brain, with consciousness itself being a by-product of physical states of the world. Early experimental work seemed to support this, suggesting that certain reflective or meta-level states arise too late to influence behaviour, and may act more like commentary than control.
But, since the cognitive revolution, epiphenomenalism proponents had to admit that it is not that simple. Back in 1970, Keith Campbell proposed what he called ‘new’ epiphenomenalism, a simple, if frustrating, take on the old version: The body produces a spiritual mind, but(!) that mind doesn’t act on the body. So, how does the brain give rise to this mind? This understanding to be forever beyond our grasp! Although echoing McGinn, this feels like eschewal and deflection…
More recently though, David Chalmers and Frank Cameron Jackson tackled the problem from a slightly different angle. They argued that we should be able to deduce claims about conscious states purely from physical facts. But also only in theory. For them, epiphenomenalism acts as a bridge that falls short of closing the explanatory gap, but still hints at a connection between the physical brain and the qualitative.
These modern takes tend to focus on the subjective side of experience. The classic illustration asks us to imagine you and a robot both eating a cupcake. The robot goes through the motions perfectly, but there’s nothing “inside” it. No taste, no enjoyment, no awareness. You, on the other hand, feel the cupcake, smell the cupcake, taste the cupcake. You have a private, raw experience accompanying the act of eating the cupcake with an inner sense of what-it-is-like, or what philosophers call a quale (plural: qualia). So while you and the robot behave identically on the outside, only you have the inner conscious life.
The importance of this is that it indicates that the why of consciousness clearly moves beyond just biological. And figuring out what that is may tell us part of its story. Experience is never just functional. It is meaningful.
For instance, through our what-it-is-like consciousness, we know that it carries moral weight. Pleasure, pain, joy, and suffering have meaning, and it matters. It shapes how we behave, how we treat others, and how we think about right and wrong. Consciousness supports flexibility and control, especially in unfamiliar or complex situations. Unconscious processes are fast and efficient, but conscious awareness allows us to slow down, integrate information, weigh options, and plan ahead. Reflective, meta-level awareness lets us step back from our own behaviour, evaluate it, and adjust it. It also underpins social life. By modelling our own minds and those of others, we can cooperate, communicate, negotiate, and build shared meaning. Meta-awareness lets us anticipate intentions, respond with nuance, and engage in social strategies far beyond simple stimulus–response patterns. Consciousness also integrates. It weaves together sensation, memory, thought, and meaning into a coherent picture of the world. By linking events with context and significance, it allows us to engage with reality in a flexible, sensitive way, giving our experiences depth and unity by turning scattered data into a lived world.
In asking why consciousness exists, we confront both its practical role and its profound significance. We see how it shapes behaviour, guides social life, unites perception and thought, and imbues action with meaning. Consciousness is not merely a system component. It is the lens through which life is felt, interpreted, and lived.
Why the Hard Problem Matters
Science routinely deals with unobservable phenomena. Fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, dimensions, dark matter, antimatter, and even other universes. But in these cases, we model the unobserved to explain what we can objectively observe. Consciousness is different. It is, by its very nature, a subjective experience and something that simply cannot be observed objectively. Your consciousness is what it is like to be you, the vehicle of your experiences of sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, and thoughts. It is what makes you a thinking, sentient being rather than a robotic homunculus or automaton.
And this is the difficulty with studying, measuring, and defining what consciousness is. We cannot look inside someone’s brain and see their experiences. We cannot truly understand the what-it-is-like of being something or someone else. At best we can ask people what they feel and make inferences based on observations and assumptions of what we think those experiences are. Or look for external manifestations of consciousness and attempt to find biological and neurological correlates we can measure. And then, multiple interpretations of the same data are possible, leading to widely divergent theories of the what, where, and how of consciousness
It is also important to distinguish scientific from philosophical questions. Neuroscience can map which patterns of brain activity correspond with conscious experience, but it cannot explain why brain activity is accompanied by subjective experience at all. This is the hard problem of consciousness, and any attempt at addressing it requires both philosophy, to grapple with the “why,” and science, to gather data on the “what” and “how.” Each approach provides a piece of the puzzle, and only by working together can we hope to make progress.
Consciousness is not a quaint mystery to be tackled only once the “serious” work of science is done. Nor should it be treated as such. And despite the dominant scientific frameworks treating consciousness as an afterthought, a by-product that occurs inside a finished world, if our models of the world cannot account for both observation AND experience, they are incomplete in the most literal sense. As the modern sciences probe both mind and matter, it is becoming increasingly clear that consciousness may actually be fundamental to the way reality unfolds. That at the very foundations of matter, we encounter a universe of potentialities, probabilities, and relational processes made manifest by mind.
Consciousness seems out of place in reductionist models not because it is anomalous, but because those models were never designed to accommodate it. To understand why this matters, and why the universe may be far less passive, settled, and observer-independent than we assume, we now have to step into the strange world of quantum theory, where reality begins to look less like a finished object and more like an open question.
This essay draws on ideas from my books Living in a Quantum Reality and A Participatory Cosmos. For a deeper exploration of these ideas, consider purchasing your copy. To support the work you can subscribe to my Substack, or make a small donation.
Lieze Boshoff is an author and researcher exploring consciousness, metaphysics, and anomalous experience through the lenses of contemporary science, psychology, and philosophy. With a background in clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and doctoral research on consciousness and perception, her work examines reality as a participatory, holographic field in which mind and matter are inseparable. She writes at the intersection of science, symbolism, and the unseen, investigating how experience itself shapes the cosmos we inhabit.
DISCLAIMER: ◦ lieze ◡ boshoff ◦ is a proudly human-made publication and a 100% AI free. Every word is mine, but so is every grammar and spelling mistake. Thank you for reading an supporting my work.