The Hard Problem

Open Questions

Five questions, not three formats

Essays, primers, and experiments are useful containers, but they're not how the ideas actually connect. This page cuts across all three, organized instead by the questions themselves. Each thread below is content on the site engaging the same underlying disagreement from a different angle, a primer laying out the terms, an essay taking a position, an experiment letting you run into it yourself.

Is there a fixed self?

Locke thought memory was the thread connecting your past selves to your present one. Parfit argued there's no further fact of identity at all, only a pattern of psychological continuity we mistake for something more solid. Su Shi got to a similar place through exile and Chan Buddhism nine centuries earlier; Ning Bo, a modern case study, got there by escaping an identity imposed on him rather than one taken away.

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PrimerPersonal Identity

Essays taking a position

EssayThe View from Inside the Mountain: Su Shi and the Case Against a Fixed SelfEssayThe Number One Prodigy: Ning Bo's Escape from a Self He Never ChoseEssayBeyond the Sea and Clouds: What It Costs to Rebuild a Mind After Losing Half of ItEssayThe Lü Boshe Problem: Why an Unbreakable Character Might Just Be an Untested One

Try it yourself

ExperimentWhich One Is the Ship?

Can you trust your own memory?

Memory feels like a recording. It behaves like a reconstruction, rebuilt slightly differently every time you retrieve it, sometimes rebuilt from pieces that were never actually there. The unsettling part isn't that memory fails occasionally. It's that a false memory and a true one can feel identical from the inside.

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PrimerThe Reliability of Memory

Essays taking a position

EssayWhen Memory LiesEssayAsk If the Kids Are Home: An Ordinary Lapse That Didn't Feel Ordinary

Try it yourself

ExperimentThe False Memory Test

Can behavior alone reveal a mind?

You only ever have direct access to one mind: your own. Everything else, another person, a dog, a chatbot, a symphony premiere read two different ways by the people in the same room, has to be inferred from behavior. The question underneath the Turing Test, the Chinese Room, and a surprising number of Cold War concert halls is the same one: is convincing behavior ever enough, or does something else have to be true underneath it?

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PrimerThe Chinese RoomPrimerThe Turing TestPrimerThe Problem of Other Minds

Essays taking a position

EssayCan a Symphony Lie? Shostakovich and the Problem of Other MindsEssayThe Black Box Inside the Black Box: What Yan-Xiang-Yi Can (and Can't) Explain About AIEssayNelly's Eyes: A Trust I Can Never Fully VerifyEssayThe Simulation Doesn't Get WetEssayThe Telephone Game Was Never About Bad HearingEssayThe Empty Fort Problem: Why Reading Another Mind Has No FloorEssayThe Cunning Hare Problem: Why Sima Yi Needed Zhuge Liang AliveEssayThe Bone-Scraping Problem: Why Feeling Nothing Isn't What HappenedEssayThe Vote That Made Its Own WinnerEssayThe Hand That Doesn't Answer Back

Try it yourself

ExperimentTalk to the RoomExperimentHuman or AI?ExperimentPlay Telephone

Is free will an illusion?

Neuroscience has found brain activity that precedes people's own reported sense of deciding to act. Daoist philosophy got to a related worry from a completely different direction: that the moments we act best are often the moments the deliberate, effortful self has stepped out of the way. Either way, the folk picture of a conscious self sitting in a control room, issuing the command before anything happens, doesn't hold up well under examination.

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PrimerFree Will and Determinism

Essays taking a position

EssayWhat Wu Wei Gets Right (and Wrong) About Free WillEssayOtto's Notebook and the Feed That Never Earned Your TrustEssayThe Northern Expeditions Problem: Why Two Different Men Would Have Marched the Same RoadEssayThe Toast My Hands Never Stopped Shaking ThroughEssayThe Four Seconds I Don't Recognize as Mine

Try it yourself

ExperimentThe Urge ClockExperimentSay the Ink, Not the WordExperimentBe Otto for a Minute

What is it like to be conscious?

A scientist who knows every physical fact about color still seems to learn something new the first time she sees red. A wireframe drawing of a cube contains no information at all about which face is in front, yet your visual system insists on deciding anyway, and can change its mind mid-stare. Both are pointing at the same gap: a complete physical description of a system doesn't obviously explain why there's something it's like to be that system, or why two readers looking at the exact same page can end up somewhere completely different inside.

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PrimerThe Hard Problem of ConsciousnessPrimerMary's Room and the Knowledge Argument

Essays taking a position

EssayFive Readers, One Chamber: The Predicting Mind in Dream of the Red ChamberEssayTechnē vs. Psyche: Why No One Has Replaced Lin DaiyuEssayBeyond the Sea and Clouds: What It Costs to Rebuild a Mind After Losing Half of ItEssayThe Room That Doesn't Signify Anything to MeEssayTwo Daughters and the Question Genetics Doesn't AnswerEssayThe Line Still Looks Longer

Try it yourself

ExperimentThe Cube That Won't Sit StillExperimentMeasure It AnywayExperimentAdventurous or Reckless?