About · The Hard Problem

I got interested in philosophy of mind on an ordinary school morning. I had a project due, and I was rushing out to the car certain I'd packed the folder in my bag. I could picture it clearly: the folder, the desk, the exact motion of zipping the bag shut. When I got to school, it wasn't there. I had to call my mom and ask her to bring it in.

What unsettled me wasn't that I'd forgotten something. It was realizing, later, that I'd packed a folder into that exact bag plenty of times before, for other projects, on other mornings. The image in my head was real. It just wasn't from that morning. My memory hadn't invented anything, it had mislabeled which day a real memory belonged to, then handed it back to me with total confidence, a source-monitoring error, the same small failure behind false eyewitness testimony and childhood memories that never happened. What stayed with me wasn't the memory science itself. It was the feeling attached to it: total certainty, and completely wrong. That gap, between how sure an experience feels and what it actually gets right, is what pulled me into the rest of philosophy of mind.

The other memory is older, ninth grade. I'd carved a woodwork project: a big fish chasing a smaller fish through sea grass. I brought it home and put it on my study table. My father saw it and studied it for a while, then said: very philosophical. Imagine the ocean it's swimming in, he said: somewhere in it, a bigger fish is chasing this big fish, and somewhere past that, a bigger fish still, chasing that one. On and on.

I hadn't meant any of that; I'd carved two fish and some sea grass. The carving didn't contain his reading any more than mine, it just left the same gap open for both of us, and his mind filled it with a prediction mine never generated. It's the same mechanism a few essays on this site keep returning to, from different angles: a mind runs on its own priors, and wherever something, a text, an image, a carving, doesn't supply enough detail to force a correction, whatever prior is already running just completes the picture, with total confidence and no sense that anything was added. My father's ocean of fish chasing fish wasn't a discovery about the carving. It was his own predicting mind doing exactly what minds do, its own small version of the question the folder already raised: how much of what I take to be fixed, a memory, a piece of wood, is really just one mind's construction, with no one checking its work.

Both memories are the same question in different clothes: neither the vivid certainty I felt packing that bag, nor the two incompatible readings that single carving supported, gets settled by describing the physical facts more precisely. That gap, between any physical description and what an experience is actually like from the inside, is what the philosopher David Chalmers named the hard problem of consciousness in 1995.

I kept writing about it on my own for a while. But essays written alone stay arguments with yourself. What I actually wanted was the thing a journal gives you and a personal blog doesn't: other people's essays sitting next to mine, disagreeing with them, testing them, making the questions sharper than I could make them by myself. A primer explaining the Chinese Room next to a guest essay from someone who's spent a career on it, next to a classmate's take that's never been published anywhere. That only happens if someone builds the room for it to happen in.

So I built one.

What we're looking for

We're not trying to publish settled answers. We want writing that sits with a hard question long enough to say something true about it, even if the conclusion is "here's exactly where this gets difficult." See the submission guidelines for specifics.

From the editor

What we're looking for

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