The Montréal Review's Tony Sobrado interviewed our own Dr. Andrew Melnyk about the hard problem of consciousness. Dr. Melnyk is a Professor of Philosophy, and specializes in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and the philosophy of science. His work focuses extensively on defining and defending physicalism and he most recently published Phenomenal Properties and the Intuition of Distinctness: The View from the Inside.

We've provided an excerpt, below. You can find the full article, On the Problem of Consciousness, on The Montréal Review's website.

ON THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

By Andrew Melnyk and Tony Sobrado

The Montréal Review, October 2025

Tony Sobrado: The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ can be thought of in two ways that essentially overlap - why is it that a physical brain gives rise to subjective first-person qualitative experiences, or why is it that some physical things, like brains, are conscious and some physical things, like rocks, are not conscious. The issue is experience or as the noted Frank Jackson said to me ‘the experience of experience’ so to speak.

Now there are some ways to initially address the hard problem of consciousness:

• It's simply a philosophical conundrum, a problem once again conjured up by pesky philosophers that is ultimately metaphysically unanswerable - akin to asking ‘where do the laws of physics come from?’
• No, it is a problem, and the problem is the metaphysical assumptions behind the universe and total ontological existence itself i.e. physicalism. Physicalism is incomplete or isn't true at all. Hence the problems that arise when one tries to marry consciousness (the mental experience) with the brain (physicalism).This harks back to the days of Descartes’ and the traditional mind-body problem which itself has evolved over history and today manifests itself in panpsychism and also in the conscious realism of Donald Hoffman.
• The opposite of number two. No, this isn't a problem. Physicalism is true. Physicalism is the only metaphysical truth and the only ontological realm that exists and therefore the conscious/mental has to be repackaged and re-conceptualised into a framework that accommodates physicalism. Here we see frameworks such as Illusionism, representational knowledge and functionalism. So here there is no phenomenal consciousness, there is no formal qualia - nothing that intrinsically outruns our direct experience, nothing above and beyond experience itself. Our experiences are essentially representational knowledge. As a consequence, elements of ‘what it is like’ simply being representational knowledge is partially supported by research from neuroscience that says ‘what it is like to undergo a conscious experience’ for any type of species is basically what their neurological model and thus neurological states dictate it is. ‘Consciousness’ is simply a model used by the physical brain to understand itself and navigate the world and its ‘experience’ is not phenomenologically real. It’s merely an illusion and working function of a physical brain.
• The hard problem of consciousness is quite a reasonable assertion. The mental and consciousness does exist and so does the brain and physicalism. The issue is how you marry the two and in what capacity you do it. So property dualism would say that the mind and brain are two different properties but ultimately one substance - physicalism - and therefore an explanation is required. This explanation could be addressing the explanatory gap or we could have a causal model, a causal chain model or a casual theory that states how consciousness arises from physical matter; or a fully reductionist approach to how consciousness ‘arises’ from a physical brain in a formulation that mimics how H2O = water. And so in the same vein we can have a reductionist chemical computation that states that neural properties = conscious experience.

And it is with the latter in mind that I turn to you - as a leading expert in the world in second order realizability and realizability in general. How it is that consciousness and other ontological entities in the world might be realized in, or even somehow reduced to, physical properties is one of your specialisms that ties into elements of consciousness. Moreover it impacts conceptual frameworks such as emergence, either strong or weak, i.e. how things such as the mind can emerge from physical properties and whether elements of realization are ultimately elements of identicalism disguised as ‘token identicalism’; or whether realization itself requires some kind of causal chain regarding how you get to elements such as consciousness being realized in physical properties and being ‘caused’ by physical properties.

Hopefully we can get to some of these issues that address the deeper and more mysterious elements about existence in general and what's going on with physicalism and what's going on with the mind?

But before we both dive straight into the deep end, let's take a step back and firstly tell me how you think of the hard problem of consciousness, does it exist at all for you?

Consciousness, phenomenal consciousness and representational knowledge

Andrew Melnyk: Let’s start with how we use the word “conscious” and its cognates in daily life, not because we should be doing a priori conceptual analysis of these words (we shouldn’t!) but simply because (i) it’s a reasonable working hypothesis that in daily life we often state truths when we use such words, and (ii) it will help to keep the discussion grounded. Then the first thing we should notice is that, at least very frequently, “consciousness” is just a synonym for “knowledge” or indeed  “awareness,” - another word that gets people very excited. I can be conscious, or aware, that my business plan involves risks, or of its riskiness. I can be conscious, or aware, that the dishwasher is on, or of the dishwasher itself and so on. I assume that it is in this sense that a rock is not conscious but a mouse is: the rock forms no knowledge-constituting representations of its environment, but the mouse does. Similarly, when I am asleep I am (mostly) not forming knowledge-constituting representations of  my environment (I say mostly, because I can be woken up by a loud noise).

Consciousness in this first sense of the word is simply the property of being conscious of something - a property possessed by organisms and more generally by complex systems. And to be conscious of something, or that something is the case, is for an organism to be in a certain kind of presumably knowledge-constituting internal state. To be in such a state is to be in a mental state. And it’s controversial whether any mental state could just be a physical state (e.g., a neural state of the brain) and dualists deny this. So I don’t want to make it sound as if there’s no problem of consciousness in this sense of the word; but it’s not the problem that philosophers of mind have been most troubled by or that fascinates some non-philosophers like neuroscientists.

Now when people speak of consciousness in connection with philosophy of mind, they often have in mind what they call ‘self-consciousness’. To be self-conscious is simply to be conscious of one’s own current mental states. Therefore to be self-conscious is simply to form knowledge-constituting representations of one’s being in certain mental states rather than of one’s environment, though obviously one can be conscious of both. But presumably not all organisms that are conscious of features of their environment are also conscious of their own mental states. For example one assumes that mice are not and it’s possible that humans are unique in this respect but I have no view on this question.

Now self-consciousness, in this sense, is just a special case of consciousness  - a synonym of “knowledge” or “awareness.” In being self-conscious, I have knowledge-constituting beliefs to the effect that I am thinking about philosophy, or that I have a mild pain in my foot etc.

This is introspection. What distinguishes such beliefs is that they don’t appear to arise from my use of any of the traditional five senses. For example, I don’t see or hear or smell my pains. How such beliefs do arise is an important empirical question, and it may be, as I suspect, that knowledge-constituting beliefs about one’s current beliefs and desires arise in a different way than do knowledge-constituting beliefs about one’s current sensations such as one’s physical pains.
So far perhaps so good. But a few decades ago philosophers commandeered the ordinary word “conscious,” and started to use it as an abbreviation of phenomenally conscious  to describe not organisms but mental states in a certain class, namely, sensations (such as pains, itches, afterimages, and waves of nausea), emotions (such as fear or anger), and moods (such as elation). And they often explained their usage by saying that a mental state, say, a pain, is phenomenally conscious if, and only if, there is something it’s like, for the person having the pain, to have the pain. Examples of such properties are the “orangeness” of an orange.

These properties are phenomenal properties or qualia. When philosophers of mind say ‘consciousness’, this is what they’re most likely to be talking about. Physicalists (or materialists) of one stripe or another think that phenomenal properties just are certain physical properties.

So do I think the hard problem of consciousness exists? Yes I do, it exists, and it concerns phenomenal properties. But we need to say exactly why phenomenal properties constitute a problem if we think that they do. We can’t just point at them, strike a deferential pose, and say, awestruck, “Those properties—they’re a problem.” And they constitute a problem because, on the one hand, there’s evidence that they are just physical properties of certain neural events in our brains - therefore neural properties, perhaps, or neurally - realized representational properties. The most important such evidence, in my view, is evidence for the systematic neural dependence of phenomenal properties on neural properties. For example, experiments have been performed in which volunteers who have been trained to describe the phenomenal character of their pains comment on pains that are deliberately inflicted on them while their brains are scanned. No sort of introspectible change over time in pains, or variation among pains at a time, has been discovered to which there fails to correspond some sort of simultaneous change in, or variation among, neural states, even though discovering such failures of correspondence lies within our current observational abilities. The neural dependence of phenomenal properties on neural properties is logically consistent with dualism; but it’s more economically explained by physicalism. That’s why it’s evidence – albeit defeasible, less than conclusive evidence, to be sure - for physicalism.

But on the other hand, however, certain plausible philosophical arguments conclude that phenomenal properties couldn’t be physical properties. Kripke’s conceivability argument at the end of his classic book Naming and Necessity, Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument, Joe Levine’s “explanatory gap” argument and David Chalmers’s zombie argument (and others). It’s easy, especially for scientists, to dismiss such arguments because the arguments don’t seem to provide empirical evidence against physicalism. But they can be formulated with theoretically considerable precision that makes them valid.

Tony Sobrado: Very interesting let's just take a step back and unpack some of these concepts and frameworks. Firstly, I think it's interesting that you mentioned representational knowledge and the comparative example between a human mind and a mouse’s consciousness in terms of representative knowledge of an external environment and how that stimuli is presented to the organisms in question. Obviously we can't to a certain extent say whether a mouse has self-awareness and self-consciousness like a human does - it's pretty safe to assume that they don't - but obviously you can’t completely know and in homage to Thomas Nagel’s ‘what's it like to be a bat’ paper no one can really know ‘what it's like to be a mouse’ which has parlayed into the zombie argument by David Chalmers. 

But it's interesting that you mentioned representational knowledge, phenomenal consciousness, qualia and the knowledge argument which I find fascinating by Frank Jackson. So firstly in terms of representational knowledge there are many that would say that there is no formal qualia, no phenomenal consciousness and in fact this is what illusionists say: that our sense that it is like something to undergo conscious experiences is due to the fact that we systematically misrepresent them as having phenomenal properties.  

Now you've also alluded to the fact that we are self-conscious, that we are aware that we have awareness - through introspection - and illusionists would say again this is just another working function of the human mind and so ‘what is it like’ in memory recall or introspection is just the working function of the mind because in real time there is nothing ‘what it is like to be’ in that moment - nothing that directly outruns the experience itself you just have that experience, you don't think ‘what it's like’ to have that experience whilst actually having the experience. I spoke to Frank Jackson for this series and Jackson has actually since his knowledge argument become a latter day physicalist so to speak and in fact Frank himself was espousing the wonders of representational knowledge to me and how there is no actual formal qualia. So between a once qualia freak, Jackson, who's now all in on representational knowledge in terms of functionalism and then also illusionism stating that there is no phenomenal consciousness that doesn't leave consciousness in a very good state currently. 

So I would like to get your thoughts on what you think of illusionism in general and whether that solves any issues regarding formal qualia and phenomenal consciousness. You see David Chalmers is going to say that the issue of experience is still there or as I like to say sensational realism is still there - you still have sensations and this can't be just simply dissolved or conceptually repackaged. Yes you may not have ‘what it is likeness’ in real time only in introspection or reflection but the emotions of fear and adulation are very pronounced and noticeable even in real time. This is the issue of experience or at least ‘the experience of experience’. So I’d like to get your thoughts on illusionism, representational knowledge and even functionalism and whether they can dissolve the hard problem of consciousness and meta-experience so to speak.

Additionally I like your conceptual understanding of the hard problem of consciousness but I'd like to discuss its actual answerability. So answering why subjectivity, experience and sensations can come out of a physical brain may be answerable either by necessity or sufficiency. For example in the case of necessity, even functionalism might do it but then you left with ‘why does functionalism itself give rise to consciousness?’ If you require a causal mechanistic explanation then, to a certain extent and depending on your interpretation of the metaphysics of causation, one could already argue that interventionist theories of causation already demonstrate that neurons cause ‘conscious’ experience but then you are left with ‘why do neurons cause conscious experience’ i.e. Joseph Levine’s explanatory gap and so asking more than that might be an unanswerable philosophical question.

I think there are certain questions that probably hark back to some elements of necessity or brute facts, things just are the way they are so if you ask me why sentience comes out of a physical brain I suppose physicists can't really tell you why the laws of physics are the way they are and not some other way! So is the hard problem of consciousness actually answerable?

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