The hardness of the so-called hard problem of consciousness lies in our unwillingness to give up the mythology of materialism. We have taken a powerful model of the world too seriously. That’s it! We have confused the map for the territory.
Our conscious experience of life comes down to two things: stimulus and stories, i.e the raw data that arrives to us through our senses and the ways we package those data up to make meaning. “Matter” is a meaning-making package with zero independent existence. The concept of matter is made of mind.
If we just stay with our direct experience, the apparent paradox of how matter gives rise to qualia drops away for free. There is no need for two ontological categories plus some mysterious way that these categories interact.
The only thing that exists is consciousness. Inherent in that existence is awareness. In some sense, the universe is made of seeming. Reality is teeming with seeming. Chris Fields expresses the beautiful metaphor that the bubbling of the quantum vacuum as microscopic particles pop into and out of existence is the universe seeking to know itself. “It’s curiosity all the way down”
There isn’t a way the universe seems. The seeming is itself the universe. Consciousness is a unified whole and all apparent separateness in the form of people, animals, objects, etc. is simply an expression of that whole. All “things” are just the ways awareness appears to itself without real modification or division.
Qualia or stimuli are different facets of the singular gem of consciousness. Similarly, the stories we use to package this raw stimulation are more facets. The way these words appear to you is a facet, the way you interpret them is yet another, etc.
Just as waves are not separate from the ocean, the abstract notion of matter is not separate from mind. Mind or awareness or seeming or consciousness is all that exists and, indeed, all that needs to exist. The confusion occurs when we endow appearances with independent reality. Useful concepts are just that. Matter is one such concept.
Passions with Reasons - Musings from heart and mind. 