Simple Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness

B Madhava Puri, PhD

INTRODUCTION

The hard problem of consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers, refers to the difficulty of explaining how and why subjective experiences arise from physical processes in the brain. In simpler terms: How does matter, which is presumably unconscious, give rise to conscious experience—like the feeling of pain, the taste of mango, or the redness of red?

Srila Prabhupada put the reverse challenge to his scientists: Scientifically show how matter comes from life [consciousness].

How shall we begin? This is always an essential consideration, despite the fact that most of science ignores this question. So let's begin at the beginning.

We Are Born as Conscious Beings

The most direct and undeniable fact of our existence is consciousness itself. Before we know anything about atoms, brains, or even bodies, we know that we are conscious. Awareness is our first and most intimate experience. We don’t acquire it; we don’t infer it. We are it. From the moment we begin to experience the world—even in infancy—it is through the medium of consciousness. Sensations, feelings, perceptions, desires, thoughts—all these are not external entities but internal experiences, luminous in their own right.

In this simple recognition lies a profound truth: we are not beings who happen to be conscious; we are conscious beings. Consciousness is not something we possess—it is the very mode of our being. This foundational insight has been at the heart of most pre-modern and traditional philosophies, especially the Vedic vision of sat-cit-ānanda (being-consciousness-bliss), which asserts that the self (ātman) is not material, but a spark of consciousness whose nature is to know, to love, and to seek meaning.

Modern Indoctrination into Existential Being

However, as we grow, we are gradually initiated into the worldview of modern science—a worldview that radically redefines what we are. We are taught that the world consists of objects, governed by physical laws, composed of particles, energy, and matter. Consciousness, in this view, is not primary—it is secondary, emergent, and accidental. It arises, somehow, from complex arrangements of material particles, especially in the brain. In other words, we are not conscious beings—we are existential beings who, by some strange twist of physical evolution, happen to feel like we are conscious.

This shift—subtle at first—becomes a deep indoctrination. We learn to mistrust our own experience in favor of objective explanations. We internalize a fundamental disjunction: what we are (consciousness) versus what we are told we are (biological machines). And as a result, we are plunged into the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness—the paradox of how subjective experience can arise from unconscious matter.

But what if this “hard problem” is not a mystery to be solved by better neuroscience, but a confusion arising from a wrong starting point?

The Simple Solution: Consciousness is Primary

The solution is as simple as the problem is perplexing: the hard problem only exists because we’ve inverted the order of explanation.

Consciousness is not a byproduct of matter. Matter, as we know it, is a concept within consciousness. Our entire knowledge of the material world is mediated through experience—sight, sound, thought, memory, inference. The “objective” world is only known to us through subjective perception. In philosophical terms, matter is an object for consciousness—never the other way around.

This view does not deny the existence of the physical world; it simply recognizes that the framework in which we know the world is conscious. Even our most abstract theories—quantum mechanics, relativity, brain scans—are constructed and interpreted by conscious minds.

The Vedic Vision: Consciousness as the Ground of Being

This is precisely the teaching of the Vedas and the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam. The cosmos is not dead matter moving aimlessly. It is a living, conscious reality grounded in Brahman—pure being-consciousness. From this Absolute arises both the subjective self (jīva) and the objective world (prakṛti). The three guṇas—sattva (clarity), rajas (activity), and tamas (inertia)—are not properties of inert matter, but modalities of consciousness itself as it manifests the material world.

The world is not something outside of consciousness; it is within consciousness—experienced, understood, and shaped through it. And more profoundly, consciousness itself is not a human phenomenon alone; it is the very life of reality. In the Bhagavad Gītā (13.23), Krishna declares Himself to be the kṣetra-jña, the knower of all fields of experience.

The Recovery of Self-Knowing

To see consciousness as primary is not to retreat from science or reason. Rather, it is to re-ground science in the conscious subject—the only place where knowing can occur. It is a return to science as experience, and philosophy as the self reflecting upon its own being.

The great German idealist Hegel recognized this. For him, the Absolute is not a thing among other things but self-knowing Spirit—consciousness that is both subject and object to itself. And this echoes the Bhagavatam’s vision: the Absolute is abhijña svarāt—conscious and independent, whose nature is to know itself and reveal itself in love.

Reversing the Mistake

The hard problem arises from beginning with the wrong premise—that consciousness is a problem to be solved from the outside. The simple solution is to start where we truly are: within consciousness. We then discover that the world, matter, time, space, and even the body are expressions within the field of awareness.

We are not existential beings trying to explain consciousness.

We are conscious beings who have misunderstood our own nature.

And in recovering this truth, not only is the hard problem dissolved—it is transfigured into a joyful recognition:

that to be conscious is to already be in contact with the Divine.

[Further details are to be found in future sections on this topic.]

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