Our “Cognitive Limitations” and the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Journal of the American Philosophical Association September 23, 2024 Andrew W. Stark
The hard problem of consciousness—explaining why there is subjective experience at all—may be unsolvable due to inherent limitations in our conceptual tools. This essay argues that the central difficulties arise from two pervasive conceptual categories: compositional concepts (part/whole, constituents/constitution) and instantiational concepts (properties/objects, universals/particulars). Examining their use across four contexts—multiple realizability, zombies, mental causation, and panpsychism—reveals that both categories encounter the same kinds of obstacles in each case. This suggests these conceptual frameworks may be key to the cognitive limitations that prevent resolution of the hard problem.