The hard problem of consciousness is most often stated as: how and why the physical processes in the brain are accompanied by subjective experience. The goal of this article is to dissolve the problem, but only if we take physicalism as a prerequisite for the analysis. We take this as an assumption, which many readers would probably find plausible nowadays. The article doesn’t solve the problem. To solve the problem, we have to recognize it. It also doesn’t say that everything around this problem is an illusion. Some aspects of the problem exist, but together they don’t consolidate into the philosophical problem; the only problems left are scientific problems.

The first concept I want to introduce is the perspective world. This is the part of reality that includes subjective experience, understanding, feelings, and other perspectival aspects of a concrete person. Let’s mentally sever all the phenomenological content from this world; what we are left with is only the first-person perspective itself. Just as empty space-time can be used as a stage for all physical objects, at least in classical physics, the first-person perspective is a stage for phenomenology. This first-person perspective cannot exist on its own; that’s a degenerate space. We cannot imagine the perspective without the content. Actually, the modern understanding of space-time has a similar property. Still, it’s useful for analysis, so we don’t just dive too soon into the complexity of phenomenological content itself.

The perspective world is the only part of reality that we can directly access, and therefore we can assert that it exists. That’s why we treat it as an axiom or epistemic primitive; everything else follows from it. Any attempt to derive the perspective world through the derived categories is possible, but meaningless (it would be circular logic like perspective world → objective world → perspective world). Now, when we have this primitive and some external information coming to this world, we can assume the objective world exists. I would define the objective world as a part of reality whose existence and conceptual framework do not depend on perspective worlds (there could be other definitions, which incorporate the perspective world itself, but they are not useful for this analysis). We assign a prior to the objective world; there is no way to prove that it exists, but it’s reasonable. I would like to emphasize how exactly we start our analysis.

We have the perspective world (we can assert at least one of them) and the objective world; the first one can be asserted to exist; the second one is a reasonable assumption. So reality consists, for us at least, of these two parts. I will also use “the World” further on to indicate these worlds combined. It’s mostly an initial definition split, which we then find useful for our purpose. In the end, of course, both worlds are part of the same physical reality, but it’s hard to derive without additional analysis and additional assumptions.

The perspective worlds (we will assume the existence of others’ perspective worlds apart from self as a plausible assumption) are born in the objective world; this is a physicalist commitment, and we don’t split the worlds causally. But after they are born, they lose transparency, and we see the emergence of the causal veil; the effects no longer pass in the original form; they are transformed using the self-causal mechanism of the perspective world itself. Moreover, the perspective world is not passive; the effects are projected from one side and reflected from the other. In the objective world, causally connected events can be mapped to each other using the same dictionary. In the perspective world, the effect is caused not just by the external world; it is also shaped by the perspective world’s own history and its medium, so direct mapping breaks down.

Let’s imagine this as a submarine in the ocean and a hydroplane. When the hydroplane is in the air, the submarine doesn’t see it. When the hydroplane lands on the water, it can’t go through to the bottom, but the submarine can detect, locate, and describe it using sonar. The description of the hydroplane by the submarine depends not just on the hydroplane’s physical parameters, but also on the water’s physical parameters and the sonar’s capabilities and resolution. Moreover, in our model, the water itself has a state that evolved from history, and this state impacts the whole scanning procedure and its outcomes.

For many readers, at first, the idea of reality pockets may seem non-physical. Let’s find examples from physics. The goal is to build the intuition, not to provide the relevant comparison. Let’s say black holes are reality pockets. They were hardly intuitive objects not long ago and looked quite peculiar in the general physical context. The classic model of black holes predicts that causal accessibility along the event horizon is one-directional. This example doesn’t serve the purpose of providing parallels to conscious experience in physics. It only serves to show that the physical world doesn’t have to be perfectly causally transparent; it can have pockets. Ordinary physical primitives and their organization can give rise to new effective peculiar structures, which may need an independent descriptive apparatus. But these pockets are born in the objective world and are still fully causally connected to it in the past; so we should call them physical. There could be many definitions of “physical”. In this article, “physical” means belonging to the same causally closed domain as the objective world. The whole world is still the same; we just have to take into consideration its evolution in time and its unique emergent phenomena, as well as other descriptive primitives arising in this World due to these structural disconnections.

I want to list the properties of the perspective world, which may be useful for further analysis:

1. Perspectival discontinuity - The conceptual frameworks are different in the two worlds; moreover, most of the self-causal content does not have direct counterparts in the objective descriptive framework. The reason is that the perspectival world has evolved under its causal veil and strongly depends on the perspective, in contrast to the objective world.

2. Informational discontinuity - The information can’t go through as it is; it’s always distorted in one way or another by the internal causation of the perspective world. In the generative conceptual model, the information isn’t just distorted; it’s constructed and compared from the other side. This makes the mapping even harder.

3. Temporal derivability - the perspective world and all its content in principle could be derived from previous states, all the way through to the objective world, but in practice it seems impossible because of a long chain of effects down to simple microscopic interactions starting from the birth of the perspective world.

4. Structural similarity - the structure of the perspective world is still dependent on the objective world, because it’s not causally disconnected and the information still flows through the veil; it still operates under the conditions of the objective world and should adjust to this world as long as it’s continuous.

With this framework in mind, Mary’s room thought experiment becomes easy to tackle. Mary, who sits in the room and learns everything about the objective world in black and white, lacks something important: she studies only part of the World, and when she comes out into the light, of course she learns something new. Moreover, if Mary assumes the existence of other perspective worlds similar to her own, we can assume that she can never learn the World, because some part of the world will always be private to her. Why? The first-person perspective seems to be baked into the physical structure; she cannot easily exchange her first-person perspective without losing identity. Every perspective state is physically indexed to its realizing system.

Now let’s discuss the hard problem. I want to split the hard problem into two possible interpretations. The first interpretation is ontological; the second is functional. It has an inbuilt ambiguity, which may lead to a question in one framing and answers in the other, and vice versa. In Chalmers’s original work, he asks why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. But “why” can mean several things. What we want to find is the cause of the observed fact, and this cause can come from the physical world itself or can come from outside the World. But we can discuss both of these questions.

Let’s focus on the ontological problem: why do some physical structures have consciousness if they couldn’t have it? This doesn’t ask how to build consciousness; it asks whether the thought experiment should include counterfactual physical structures in which the same brain, with the same physical parameters and physical environment, would not have a perspective world.

Let’s unpack the ontological question.

In the simplest setup, we have two cases:

1. a physical objective structure that we observe, from which a perspective world emerges

2. a counterfactual reality where the same physical objective structure doesn’t bring about the perspective world

And now we ask: why the first and not the second? The ontological question could be relevant for dualists, because they can come up with some non-physical selection mechanism for one configuration over the other, or assume something nonphysical in one structure that brings about the perspective world. But it’s not relevant to physicalism. Physicalism assumes only one physical reality with one set of particular physical regularities. This physical world is causally closed (as defined earlier) and mathematically determined. This is the reality in which we see 1. The reality in which 2 happens should include all causal derivations from the physical structure, according to the existing physical regularities, including the perspective world. If it fails to do so, it’s not physical itself (according to our physical regularities), and the comparison has an inbuilt contradiction.

The philosophical zombie thought experiment clearly illustrates the ontological hard problem. We imagine an alternative world where everything else is the same, apart from the fact that the same physical structures don’t bring about perspective worlds. From a physicalist perspective, the question is easy to tackle. There is no such alternative reality. The counterfactual is fictional and non-physical by nature, because it assumes a different causal structure and therefore it cannot be a complete physical duplicate of our world under the assumed physicalism. If someone nevertheless insists on the same complete physical reality plus absence of perspective, they have introduced a non-physical degree of freedom not contained in the physical specification.

But in the hard problem, it’s hard to recognize a similar resolution immediately, because it talks about counterfactual physical structures, not about counterfactual realities.

If we still want to answer the ontological hard problem in physicalism, we can answer it with one sentence: “Because it’s so.” Yes, the answer is axiomatic, as is the existence of the perspective world itself. Does this exclude the possible existence of some parallel, similarly organized purely physical parts of the World without the perspective worlds? No, it doesn’t exclude it, but it also ensures that these parts of the World should lack some physical property or constituent that we have; they cannot be full duplicates of our part of the World in the physical sense.

Now the confusing part of the hard problem of consciousness is tackled; we can ask not why experience exists at all, but rather what physical processes bring about the perspective world - it’s a functional/scientific problem.

The “why” question can still be used in the functional sense; it isn’t always ontological, but it was tainted by the zombie argument and similar setups, so it’s hard to disentangle it from the inbuilt ambiguity, and we will not use this “why” further in this article.

So let’s think about this functional question. Sure, this is not an easy question either. But how can we even approach this question? Most of the formulations mean that we need to find the conditions in the objective world that bring about the content of the perspective world. We want to find explanations that are not dependent on particular observers, and this is totally understandable. But remember the main properties of the perspective world: perspectival discontinuity. It means the objective and perspective worlds have different content and different descriptions. A useful analogy could be two very different formal systems in mathematics, which are based on different primitives and axioms and have different concepts as their content; derivability does not entail direct translatability. Informational discontinuity makes everything even worse. Now even the same structures are distorted in the other world. The first-person world can describe the objective world only in its own definitions, sometimes using similar or totally unrelated terms or vocabulary, while still missing the multilayered, complex objective properties themselves. The objective world has an even worse time trying to explain the perspective world in its own terms, because most of the content of the perspective world is generated and used internally.

What could this mean for our question? Parts of the perspective world, including subjective experience categories such as feeling, qualia, and understanding, are only directly describable using the terms of the perspective world itself, and translating one conceptual framework into another is a challenging task. But as we already discussed, phenomenal properties have structural similarity with objective properties, and this is what should be used to understand the conditions for the emergence of the perspective world. With this principle in mind, the question of the conditions for the perspective world is, in principle, solvable. It is a scientific question, not a philosophical one.

Yes, the attentive reader can notice that we still have a back door left. It’s temporal derivability. We imagine how we could wind back the causal chain of the perspective world, and, taking into account all its interactions with the objective world starting from the birth of the perspective world and accounting for its origin itself, we can build a full reconstruction of the perspective world in the language of the objective world. But is it possible? Complete reconstruction may range from tractable in controlled systems to effectively impossible in historically complex natural systems. Either way, it remains a scientific problem, not a philosophical one.

So what is the way to study it now? As I already mentioned, both worlds are separated by a veil. What happens on this boundary provides a practical way to find projections between a perspective world and an objective world. Using the property of structural similarity, we can run experiments in both worlds and mix and match structural similarities, without seeking a unified language. For now, many scientific studies focusing on this cross-world research are explicitly concerned with objective representation up to the boundary, but often downplay the corresponding representations in the perspective world. Ideally, this work should go from both sides and be aligned on the boundary; all of these directions of research are trackable scientific problems.

We can use objective external conditions for the perspective world, like evolutionary conditions, to simulate different paths of development for the perspective world. If we don’t seek a unified conceptual framework but rely on similar structures, we can understand the relationships between the phenomenal content of the perspective world and the objective world and find the conditions for its existence. Let’s say qualia have a particular structure. They can be analyzed by similarity, modality, intensity, valence, categorical boundaries, and temporal structure. Different modalities have different sensitivity ranges, which should also be coarse-grained into qualitative, evolutionarily meaningful regions. Evolution plays a great role in understanding the organization of perspective worlds. Is it possible to use the structural properties of color to understand whether people have a similar perception of “red”? Sure, to a great extent, this is a mathematical problem, not a philosophical one. One of the recent examples of this type of research is “Robust individual alignment of color qualia structures: toward a structure-based taxonomy of divergent color experiences.”

These “qualitatively different” modalities are represented as perceptions of the sense organs in phenomenal language. Still, they could also be represented as a multidimensional mathematical space in the objective language. Let’s return to the example with the submarine. The more we learn about the water and sonar system of the submarine, the better we understand its behavior, but from the outside we don’t see the submarine and don’t have direct access to its sonar. The researchers let the hydroplane land on the water and send signals from outside to the submarine so they can get a description of the same hydroplane back. Then they match the representations to draw conclusions and make assumptions about the whole underwater system.

Now let’s define consciousness as a perspective world with the relevant form of perspectival content and its organization. Someone may consider it too strong a transition; it’s just a definition of consciousness in our framework. As we discussed earlier, we don’t imagine the existence of the bare perspective; it’s just a useful model for a clean thought process. The perspective world is the perspectival content.

In the research framework that I proposed, the first-person perspective is not the scientific objective; it’s the main axiom, and all other research directions follow from this epistemic primitive. Every scientific framework rests on presuppositions that it cannot fully justify from within itself. For example, most physical research presupposes that nature exhibits regularities. Knowledge cannot be generated without these assumptions. Ideally, assumptions should be strong and overarching. By overarching, I mean their descriptive power and, as a result, impact. We already discussed that if we look at the first-person perspective axiom as an assumption, it is the strongest assumption we can have. Is it overarching?

Let’s think for a moment. In the classical scientific tradition, the human is presented as just yet another physical structure. And physical structures are regarded as frame-independent and objective. We are considered just a part of the objective physical world, and human physical properties, including consciousness, are treated as mundane physical properties. Then we think about consciousness, and it becomes surprising: why does it seem so peculiar, and why does it have its weird ontology? The problem that we discussed earlier is that the perspective-world existence primitive is actually much stronger than the assumption of the objective world itself and more natural for the observer. But also, the perspective world is significant even in the objective world itself. Taking into account the history of humanity, especially the recent years of AI development, when the perspective language becomes the most coherent way to describe the objective behavior of AI systems, we can now recognize the potential impact of perspective worlds on the whole universe. And this is why this assumption is not just strong, but also objectively impactful.

So what are we left with? We have two scientific problems:

1. Problem of consciousness reconstruction: full derivation of consciousness using only the objective world descriptions. This is a scientific problem, but it may range from tractable to effectively impossible, and in our framework we are not required to solve it, because the basic primitive is the perspective world itself.

2. Conditional problem of consciousness – finding the relative conditions for the existence of consciousness and understanding its structural characteristics. This is a solvable problem using structural similarity and coordinated research on every side.

In physicalism, there is no place for the ontological problem of consciousness. And if we separate the ontological question from the problem of deriving and understanding consciousness and its conditions, and if we use the correctly established scientific primitives, we can see that we are left only with extremely difficult, perhaps even effectively intractable, but nevertheless scientific problems.

Sources

• David J. Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (1995)

• Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia” (1982)

• Markus Pössel, “Changing Places: Space and Time Inside a Black Hole” (2010)

• Togashi et al., “Robust individual alignment of color qualia structures: toward a structure-based taxonomy of divergent color experiences” (2026 preprint)