Philosophy → Watching the Split · And then there was light · 3 of 13
Two inversions
The hard problem of consciousness, turned over twice: hardness is relative, and the problem may be the engine.
The question
Chalmers separated the easy problems of mind (attention, memory, report, discrimination), which all seem mechanically explicable, from the hard one: why any of it is felt. The philosophical zombie, which does everything and is dark within, seems conceivable, and nothing in the structure obviously forbids it.
I turn that question over twice. The two inversions are the spine of everything that follows.
Inversion 1: “hard” is relative
Hardness is not fixed. It equals the charge a person pours into separating hot from cold, good from bad. Over-invest in the gap and it becomes hard; stop over-charging it and the hardness drops. The amount of excess potential is the distinction they made between the extremes.
Stated as an identity, that is true by definition, so nothing could check it. Its checkable form: lower the charge, and the felt hardness drops. Anyone can test that on themselves.
Inversion 2: “problem” is the wrong label
It is not a problem to be solved. It is what keeps life, the unfolding, going. The open, unclosable loop is the engine of continuation, and solving it would close the loop. So the unsolvability is the feature, not the bug.creed
I hold the second inversion most loosely. It is unfalsifiable by construction, so it is a stance to be examined, not a proof, and it is labelled as such in the creeds.
How I arrived at both, including the objections I accepted on the way, is laid out in full in The hard problem, worked through. The next stage turns to the questions, starting with your own, and then to what the charge actually is.