The Hard Problem of...Psychology?

The hard problem of consciousness was made famous by the philosopher David Chalmers. He presented it at the first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in 1994. He defined it as the problem of “how and why” physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective conscious experiences (i.e., the taste of wine or seeing the colors of a rainbow). He further elaborated on the analysis a few years later in his influential book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.

Part of what made his analysis helpful was that Chalmers differentiated what he called the “easy” problems from the “hard” ones. The easy problems deal with brain functions and behavior. For example, to explain why a frog zapped a fly with its tongue, we can think of its brain as a kind of neuro-information processing center that governs the frog’s body. That system has a template that picks up visual stimuli that behave the way flying insects behave. And there are motor reflex programs that shoot the tongue out.

But does the frog actually see the fly? Does success or failure at snatching the fly result in feelings of pleasure or frustration? Is there anything that it is like to be a frog from the inside? Or, are frogs “zombies” (i.e., the philosophical term for there being no subjective conscious experience at all)? As lively as frogs are “from the outside,” it is an open scientific question if they have subjective conscious experiences.

In The Conscious Mind, Chalmers labeled the easy problems as being “psychological” in nature. These are problems having to do with behavioral outputs and related neurocognitive functions, but have no direct relation to subjective experience. In contrast, he labeled subjective experiences the “phenomenal” aspects of the mind. The difference between the two is clear in the case of the frog. We know a lot about the frog's neurocognitive activity, defined in terms of the functional relations between the frog’s brain and its behavior in its environmental context. However, we know little about its phenomenal experience, including the question of whether it has any.

UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge¹, aligns with Chalmer’s analysis in many regards. However, it comes at the problem from an entirely new angle. Chalmers was first trained as a physicist, and then he became a philosopher. As such, he comes at the question from the vantage point of its philosophical nature. This can be framed by the question: What is consciousness, and how does it fit inside the physical universe?

I am trained as a clinical psychologist. My journey toward a unified theory of psychology started at about the time as the new science of consciousness was being born. At that time, I was learning to become a psychotherapist and wanted a coherent scientific framework in which to ground my approach. It turns out there is not one. Why? Because, as I have detailed in many blogs, journal articles, and two books^1,2,3,4,5, psychology is not a coherent discipline. It lacks a coherent identity and subject matter. It is something I have labeled "the problem of psychology."

Why and how did the problem of psychology emerge? Psychology started out as the science of consciousness. We can see this in two of its earliest established lines. First there were the psychophysicists in the middle of the 19^th century. They looked at the relationship between physical stimuli and sensation and developed the “psychophysical laws” that continue to impact research today (e.g., absolute threshold and just noticeable difference). Then came Wilhelm Wundt, who officially founded the science of psychology in 1879. He framed it as the science of human consciousness and trained folks in the methods of introspection. Wundt’s methods and findings came under attack by both functionalists and behaviorists, and his approach, which came to be known as structuralism, died.

The reason it died was because there was “gap” when it came to subjective experience. The gap was both epistemological and ontological. The epistemological gap was the fact that the nature of science is that it is based on behaviors that can be measured and verified via intersubjective agreement. The ontological gap is what Chalmers points to as the hard problem.

Behaviorists like John Watson thought of the brain as being like a set of wires on a switchboard, and behavior was produced by how electrical impulses cause reflexes. But consciousness was a mystery and was banned from behavioral psychology. Decades later, the cognitive revolution happened and cognitive psychology embraced the concept of the brain as a kind of neuro-information processing system. The result has been that psychology became aligned with functional analyses of behavior and mental processes, analyzed through the methods of science.

Consciousness Essential Reads

Attention as a Criterion of Free Will

What Does It Actually Mean to Be Conscious?

However, as I have made clear in my writings on the problem of psychology, this means psychology completely failed to solve the ontological problem. That is, the science of psychology has been defined as a methods-based discipline—psychologists do not have a clear, consensually agreed-upon framework for what they mean by “the mind.”

The Current Science of Consciousness Is Round 2

The 30 years since the first Toward a Science of Consciousness conference have seen an explosion of interest in consciousness. However, despite all the activity, serious problems are emerging. A recent, massive review on the “landscape” of theories of consciousness identified almost 85 different angles and approaches! There is debate about whether progress is being made on the hard problem. Consider that in 1998, the neuroscientist Christoph Koch bet Chalmers a fine case of wine that progress in the field would be made in the next 25 years at answering the question of what consciousness is. Koch lost the bet and paid up in 2023. There has also been serious infighting between different approaches. For example, last year Integrated Information Theory, which is one of the more popular and heavily researched approaches, came under attack in the form of an open letter of over 100 scholars accusing it of being “pseudoscience.” This attack was reminiscent of the attack the behaviorists launched against Wundt and the structuralists.

My father is an emeritus professor of history. A common phrase in our household growing up was one of the great adage of historians: Those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it.

Given that scientific psychology started out being defined as the science of consciousness but failed, one might think that the history of psychology and the problem that emerged would be relevant to the new science of consciousness. However, as far as I could tell, not a single approach in the massive review on the landscape of consciousness addresses the problem of psychology. Instead, the ideas were mostly from philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists grappling with how consciousness fits in the universe as defined by physics. As a theoretical psychologist who knows the history of psychology, I am here to say, “We have been here before!”

The hard problem of consciousness surfaced more than a century ago, and it ended up breaking psychology. As such, maybe we need a new frame on this problem. Perhaps we should return to the problem of psychology, and see if we can grip the problem from that angle. When you do this from the perspective of UTOK a whole new solution to the difficulties becomes apparent¹.