The Hard Problem and the Living Moment of Now

If you’ve plunged into the philosophical arena of human consciousness, I think we’d agree—if on nothing else—that the expert dialogue is a great big ball of confusion. After all, in a 2024 survey by Robert Kuhn, there are 325 competing philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. That’s not theories closing in on understanding; that’s 325 opinions that don’t convince any peers.

At the head of this ball of confusion is the Descartes-Nagel-Chalmers paradigm, summed up in Chalmers’ Hard Problem of Consciousness: Why and how do physical processes in the brain (neural activity) give rise to subjective experience? What is it like to be something? How does matter become thought?

Writer Marvin Von Renchler excellently summarizes the flaw in the Hard Problem: “Rather than demonstrate a separation between physical processes and subjective experience, it is assumed.”

Biologically, everything we observe points to continuity: increasingly complex systems of memory, integration and self-referential processing emerging stepwise under selection pressures. There is no clear place for something non-physical to be introduced.

Von Renchler concludes that, “The ‘hard problem’ is less an unsolved mystery and more a framing issue, a mismatch between philosophical categories and how evolved systems actually work.”

There’s another objection I’ve yet to receive a serious response to: Why search for our mind wholly within our brain in the first place?

Consider that our body is what does all the touching, smelling and tasting, the looking and hearing, the interacting with our physical reality. The whole point of our brain is to make our body possible and to enable it to navigate our days.

Besides, our brain is connected to every centimeter of our body, and there are constant multi-channel dialogues happening within us. Our stomach thinks along, as do our sexual organs, and more. Dr. Nick Lane points out that it might be more constructive to think about consciousness as a symphony of our diverse, complex systems and organs, with the brain as the conductor. The brain cannot function without the body, and vice versa.

In his book “The Hidden Spring,” Dr. Mark Solms suggests a fruitful way to think about our introspective consciousness as the inside reflection of our living body communicating with itself. I can’t think of a more beautiful way of phrasing it.

This also answers the second question. It feels like something because we actually are something! An individual physical biological entity, with a multitude of cooperating complex organs and systems engaged in keeping up with our active body as it is keeping up with life and the relentless unforgiving pace of the living moment of now. It is that simple.

This brings us to that sensation of “Qualia”—another notion worth sitting with. Why does the experience of an experience feel special? The taste of a grape; the feel of a biting wind; the touch of a lover; and so on. Is it actually as mysterious as many make it sound?

What’s special about Qualia? I’m always left with the sense of the living moment of Now coursing through my body.

I am, and while I am living this moment, my body is busy processing the incredible firehose of information the living moment is projecting at my body/brain. Internal biology is actually a noisy crowded place with dynamic physical systems that possess mass and momentum, they project influence and are influenced by neighboring systems, all of it needing exquisite coordination and timing.

Qualia is the fleeting living moment of Now, within which our biological lives unfold. Shouldn’t it feel unique? Metaphorically, it seems to me similar to the difference between being there and looking at a postcard.

Fascinatingly, the living moment of now occurs in unison across our entire globe, at all scales and complexities. That could invite a little philosophical musing regarding reality and the dimension of time.

Incidentally, more often than not, we operate on autopilot, thanks to the competence of our complex systems. It is literally our body’s exquisite internal consciousness that gives us our freedom to daydream.

Here, I’m sure, Chalmers would call foul: “Thoughts and consciousness simply cannot come from matter! Our body is made out of atomic matter, same as rocks, ergo…”

I would agree, rocks can’t think. But, I’d also point out that there is a world of difference between elemental matter and biological matter.

This requires evolution lessons starting with our primal Earth’s evolution—here I recommend Professor Robert Hazen regarding the evolution of minerals and how they helped set the stage for life. Back then, all matter was confined to the simple laws of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, weak atomic interaction and strong atomic interaction. Even after eons of time, the creative peak of these prebiotic arrangements of atoms was that Earth’s ocean water turned into organic molecular soup.

That is, molecules along a backbone of carbon atoms with a variety of six elemental atoms (CHNOPS: Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus and Sulfur) attached to them. Many varieties of organic molecules were created in our oceans, left to float around. Bumping into each other, occasionally making yet more complex organic molecules. But from there they were stuck, with nothing to do as the eons passed them by.

Then came the amazing Krebs cycle about a half billion years into Earth’s existence. Dr. Nick Lane’s most recent book “Transformer” does a wonderful job of explaining how Earth’s geology and chemistry hammered out a molecular machine that captured and harnessed electricity within a reaction chain—that grabs and transfers hydrogen ions and electrons, creating high-energy electron carrier/reducing agents that move electrons to mitochondria and other metabolism cycles.

This provides energy, electricity for doing work, such as creating electrochemical gradients that drive the synthesis of ATP, the body’s energy currency, various molecular components, making mitochondria possible, and much more.

Yes, impossibly complex, unless you have a super mind and super computers to push the calculations. But it’s worth taking a moment to become aware of. Perhaps also to be humbled by what nature hath created.

For this discussion what matters is that the Krebs cycle quite literally vitalizes a special subset of molecules, harnessing electricity, transforming it to do work and communicate, enabling appropriate organic molecules to be stitched together and accomplish ever more complex tasks.

It is here, at the beginning of life, where we can find the truly Hard philosophical Problem: Why do living systems possess that inexorable drive to thrive?

To quote Dr. Lane: “…It might seem uncanny that whole metabolic pathways can spring into existence in this way, in the absence of genes and information, but this is what recent experiments are telling us. There is something thermodynamically and kinetically favoured about the innermost chemistry of life. I find this unsettling, but that’s how it is.”

By and by, organisms appeared and bioelectricity’s motive abilities played an ever greater role in body development, communication and behavior. Dr. Michael Levin—another must-read scientist and by some accounts an odds-on contender for a Nobel Prize—has demonstrated the link between creature development and bioelectricity with extraordinary experiments. He describes the evidence for bioelectricity providing a “cognitive glue” governing cell communication, shape and regeneration.

That is significant and should shake philosophers. Instead, philosophers dismiss it as the Easy Problem. Interesting, but somehow irrelevant to understanding consciousness.

Which brings us back to the consciousness confusion and what to do about it. What is crippling modern philosophical efforts to realistically conceptualize human consciousness?

Could there be something about our human attitude itself that hobbles us before we even begin to inquire? Where do philosophers go from here?

What would Descartes do?

I’m no scholar, but I have read René Descartes’ “Meditations” and learned something about that remarkable thinker. I believe I know what he would do in this situation. Given his own record, he would suggest students toss out everything—counseling them to forget all they have learned about philosophy, trust no one’s word, nor metaphysical just-so stories.

Make a fresh start by learning from modern, down-to-earth, fact-based, scientific, evolutionary, biological understanding. There are many wonderful scientists and doctors who are also excellent authors and speakers. Read and listen to their fact-based stories for clues to unraveling your deepest questions. Spend some effort weaving together and striving to grasp our evolutionary story in your mind’s eye.

The ancients only had their imagination and logic with precious few physical facts to work off of. Today we have the most amazing natural history and scientific awareness at our fingertips. We have the choice to use these rational factual building blocks of substantive understanding for our story. “Seek and ye shall find” may seem trite, but that’s how it is.

Earth and life’s outlines are simple, clear and consistent. It is the details that become devilishly difficult—which is why we have serious full-time students, scientists and other experts doing the hard work of gathering new facts and drawing lessons that are sound and trustworthy, based on the information at hand. Take advantage of what they offer.

Scientists have learned a great deal about how senses receive, process and communicate with the brain, with the brain communicating back, in an ongoing complex dialogue. The array of imaging methods for recording thoughts in real time, even predicting thoughts, is astounding. We can watch it in action. Why isn’t that enough to challenge continued philosophical mysterianism?

Dismissing these findings and images as the Easy Problem, thus irrelevant, feels contrived and defensive. It also opens the Hard Problem to charges of being a fanciful intellectual construct, far removed from the reality of modern physical, evolutionary, biological understanding.

Where to start with a new philosophical paradigm?

Perhaps with a clear, explicit appreciation for the Human Mind/Physical Reality divide—recognizing what belongs in the world of our intellect, with its thoughts, imagination and metaphysics. And what is grounded in physical reality, including the biology this Earth has created. The stuff that makes up Earth’s inescapable reality.

Sit with that. Consider that everything you know has been processed through your biological senses and body as it travels toward your brain, which is return-signaling constantly. The whole of it produces internal awareness and our sense of consciousness. We perceive our reality, we never create it.

We are actual biological animals, made of the same stuff as all the other creatures, existing because of an incredible evolutionary pageant—one that started long before we, the self-proclaimed supreme observers, were here, and Earth will continue long after we disappear.

How am I sure? I accept that the Earth around me is real, and its very complexity demands that Earth possesses a deep and actual physical history, unfolding one day at a time, back into the dimmest past. A pageant that progressed down one specific track to get here. The future is undetermined, while the past is fixed. In between, there is the reality of the living moment of Now.

My mind’s eye images a tall grass prairie on a hot day with an advancing wildfire line. Before it the golden fields of potential, behind it the black of finality.

As for the consciousness discussion, in my experience, evolution rarely enters these conversations seriously — and when it does, it’s a superficial hand wave before moving on.

Leaving our ideas about our evolving body vague and distant, while for me deep understanding of Evolution is central to my being.

Knowing Evolution happens isn’t the same as understanding what happened, nor how your body was molded over the past half billion years. Where simply the knowing, opens up more associated insights.

This is where the intellectualizing rubber of our imaginations meets the hard gravel road of being a human, struggling to make sense of grand notions.

Why do I believe Evolution should be personal?

Because it was life changing for me. It started with a lifelong passion for learning about evolution. Not just dinosaurs, but all animals, and how plants came to be. Why such a wide variety of life and geology?

That instinctive interest was supercharged when I helped with my daughter’s delivery. Watching her skull bones forcing their way through, before the brain could follow and push through to take up permanent occupancy of her skull—totally unexpected, shocking beyond polite description—and then she was there. A new tiny individual Self, with her body ready and demanding to get on with the next chapter of her journey of existence.

With the severing of her umbilical cord and the breaking of her physical connection to her mother, a petit epiphany washed over me.

I was taken into a sacred moment as old as life. I fell into a wormhole of my generational birth receding ever further into the dim past. That changed me. That’s when the study of Earth’s evolution and all her creatures became downright personal. How personal?

Well, when I get out of the shower and see the reflection of my belly button, I’m present to the reality that my body possesses half a billion years’ worth of 100% successful generations as my specific genetic heritage—with all its physical changes along the way—changes that produced this body I currently exist within. To be more exact, the “me” my body and my physical circumstance is producing.

This living body produces all my thoughts, consciousness, soul and sense of Self and even my sense of God, out of the totality of my lived experiences. I am a filament in the tapestry of Earth’s evolutionary pageant.

Seriously, over half a billion years of evolution are packed into each of our body plans. That tiny worm we started as, already needed to be conscious of itself and its surroundings, to collect and process information, to strategize, to give commands and to change in accord with conditions. Check out Professor Arthur Reber’s Cellular Basis of Consciousness theory for a deeper dive.

The moral of this story?

Awareness and consciousness have been one of nature’s main projects since the beginning of life.

Without recognizing that bedrock evolutionary grounding, philosophical discussions on the topic are like playing basketball in zero gravity.

I dream of fresh younger minds taking on antiquated notions with the solid sober knowledge gained through up-to-date scientific efforts.

This is about more than developing realistic philosophical concepts, it’s about helping people find a realistic path to a rational understanding of their “Self,” via appreciating where we really come from.

With that increasing understanding, the struggles between my “Flesh” and my “Spirit” started making way more sense.

It also provides insights that lead to more constructive strategies for dealing with myself and this world around me. No super powers, simply understanding the music and dance steps a whole lot better, and the feeling of having arrived and being at home upon this planet for my allotted time. That was worth the world to me.