Why Consciousness Might Not Be Hard At All
For centuries, thinkers have wrestled with what philosophers call the hard problem of consciousness, trying to understand why physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, qualitative experiences. Philosophers and neuroscientists often argue that biological systems possess special causal powers that silicon can never replicate. Joscha Bach rejects this biological supernaturalism entirely, choosing instead to view consciousness through the lens of information processing and functionalism. In this view, the feeling of realness is simply a feature dimension generated by the mind, much like color, sound, or weight. When we dream or hallucinate, our brain merely tags internal representations as real. Consciousness itself is fundamentally a multi-order feedback loop where second-order perception involves monitoring our own perceptions, and third-order perception introduces the perspectival observer we recognize as the self. Why do we experience consciousness at all? Bach hypo...