The Category Error: Why the Hard Problem of Consciousness Needs No Solution
Aristotle Dee, Placido Churante
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) March 30, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19330565 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | Argues that the hard problem of consciousness is a category error because it seeks to explain a first-person given in third-person terms, and that the concept of an 'objective fact about experience' is incoherent. Contends that scientific knowledge is intersubjective and that classical objections such as zombies, Nagel's bat, Jackson's Mary, Dennett's reductionism, and panpsychism all mistakenly treat subjective attributions as objective facts. |
Abstract
This paper argues that the hard problem of consciousness rests on a category error: the attempt to explain a first-person given in third-person terms. The core principle: there are no facts outside of perceptual spheres — only models within spheres and intersubjective agreement between them. Part 1 establishes that scientific knowledge is intersubjective, not objective in the strict sense, and that the predictive processing paradigm reveals model construction as substrate-independent. Part 2 distinguishes a weak reading (experience is undetectable) from the strong reading this paper defends: the concept 'objective fact about experience' is incoherent. Five classical objections — zombies, Nagel's bat, Jackson's Mary, Dennett's reductionism, panpsychism — are diagnosed as variations of treating subjective attributions as objective facts.T he paper draws consequences for the moral status of artificial intelligence and concludes that consciousness research, freed from the hard problem, can progress empirically
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