What if our puzzlement about consciousness is itself a clue? #
Posted August 19, 2026 [ Reviewed by Lybi Ma
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Key points
- The hard problem asks why neural processing is accompanied by subjective experience.
- Causal closure leaves no obvious room for consciousness to influence physical events.
- If experience causes nothing, physicalism must explain why we keep talking about it.
- Our bafflement about qualia may itself be caused by consciousness.
Consciousness might be the one fact we know too intimately to understand fully. Whenever we encounter ourselves or a world, consciousness is already there, supplying the first-person dimension.
This brings us to David Chalmers’ “hard problem” of consciousness. Science can investigate how brains discriminate stimuli, direct attention, form memories, and produce reports. These are difficult problems, but we know what sort of explanation we seek: mechanisms performing functions. The hard problem is more fundamental. Why should experience accompany those functions? (Chalmers, 1995, 1996; Levine, 1983).
Philosophers call these subjective qualities qualia: the redness of red, the bitterness of coffee, the painfulness of pain. A quale is not the brain’s ability to distinguish red from green or pain from touch, but the subjective character accompanying that ability (Nagel, 1974; Jackson, 1982). It is unusual, to say the least; but the question is also whether this phenomenal ingredient merely accompanies physical processing or makes a causal difference.
A Physicist’s Uncomfortable Argument #
My friend and colleague Avshalom Elitzur, renowned quantum physicist and brilliant philosopher, has developed one of the most ingenious contemporary arguments in this territory. These questions also formed the subject of two volumes that Avshalom and I edited together, Mind and Its Place in the World and Irreducibly Conscious (Batthyany and Elitzur, 2006, 2009). His own argument leads towards the unsettling possibility that the current physical description is radically incomplete. For a time, this made him a reluctant dualist. From what I now hear, he has recently drifted towards the equally wild, and rather beautiful, territory of panpsychism—still hardly safe ground for a physicist.
The Price of Letting Consciousness Act #
His “Bafflement Argument” gains its bite from the causal closure of the physical world: every physical event has a sufficient physical cause. Neurons fire because of prior physical conditions; muscles contract because neurons fire. Physics should tell the entire causal story without a blank space marked “mind intervenes here” (Kim, 1998).
This is a load-bearing commitment of modern science. If consciousness alters a neural event, its physical account is incomplete—and that carries a penalty. On Elitzur’s analysis, allowing nonphysical consciousness to influence the brain may require revisiting conservation laws or thermodynamics. A mental influence cannot be slipped into the equations without paying for it somewhere.
The usual escape is to declare consciousness causally idle. One may identify qualia with brain activity, or regard them as real but epiphenomenal: the brain produces consciousness, while consciousness produces nothing in return. Qualia add nothing to behaviour. Elitzur calls this the “Qualia Inaction Postulate.”
The Clue Consciousness Wasn’t Supposed to Leave #
Here comes his decisive move. Instead of treating qualia only as objects in need of explanation, Elitzur draws attention to a further physical fact: human beings are baffled by them (Elitzur, 1989, 2009).
We notice that their felt character seems absent from physical description. We formulate the explanatory gap, invent philosophical zombies, write books and organize conferences. Bafflement acquires a physical footprint.
Elitzur’s argument is therefore almost embarrassingly direct: we are baffled by qualia because we have qualia. If experience explains our talking about experience, then experience has affected physical behaviour. Consciousness has touched the controls after all.
Can Bafflement Be Explained Away? #
The physicalist can reply that the brain constructs an incomplete model of its own operations and mistakes that incompleteness. Bafflement would then be a metacognitive illusion generated entirely by neural machinery—an approach developed more generally by contemporary illusionists (Frankish, 2016).
That is possible, but not yet an explanation. If bafflement is an error (qua physicalism), there must be a physical or computational account of it. The physicalist must explain why information processing makes a system insist that it possesses an unobservable phenomenal ingredient. Such an account might reveal the hard problem as a defect of intelligent self-representation. Until then, “illusion” labels the problem rather than solving it.
PhilosophyEssential Reads
The Zombie Who Writes About Consciousness #
Elitzur presses the point through Chalmers’ philosophical zombie: our perfect physical duplicate, but without experience. Chalmers accepts that his zombie twin would nevertheless write the same books, love the same deep greens and purples, and complain that physics leaves qualia out (Chalmers, 1996).
But in a certain way, this is the strangest part. Why should a being without experience independently discover an explanatory gap about experience? It may report access to internal states but ignorance of their machinery. That concerns information and self-monitoring—an “easy” problem—not why any state should feel like anything.
This difference drives Elitzur’s “Asymmetry Proof.” The zombie’s perceptual states arise by physical necessity from its architecture; it cannot subtract them while holding every physical fact constant. Chalmers, however, claims that he can subtract qualia while leaving every physical and functional fact untouched. The two forms of bafflement therefore have different objects: incomplete access to processing versus the apparent possibility of all that processing occurring with nobody home. Explaining the first does not explain the second (Bailey, 2006).
Something Has to Give #
The bafflement argument exposes the tension among four attractive claims: qualia are real; they are not reducible to functions; the physical domain is causally closed; and our reports about experience are genuinely responsive to the experiences they report. Retaining all four makes our discourse about consciousness look like an extraordinary coincidence.
Elitzur accepts the penalty and loosens causal closure. Others may deny qualia, reduce them to functional self-models, or insist that our reports would be identical in an entirely experience-free world. But each position now owes an argument. The bafflement argument prevents the causal impotence of consciousness from being treated as a quiet, cost-free compromise.
It is simple, elegant and, in the age of artificial intelligence, possibly programmatic. Above all, it remains a standing challenge to the other side. If consciousness makes no causal difference, why has it left the physical world so full of arguments about consciousness?
Any takers?
References
Bailey, A. (2006). [Zombies, epiphenomenalism, and physicalist theories of consciousness](https://doi.org/10.1353/cjp.2007.0000). *Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 36*(4), 481–509.
Batthyany, A., & Elitzur, A. C. (Eds.). (2006). [ Mind and Its Place in the World: Non-Reductionist Approaches to the Ontology of Consciousness](https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110325683). Ontos Verlag.
Batthyany, A., & Elitzur, A. C. (Eds.). (2009). Irreducibly Conscious: Selected Papers on Consciousness. Universitätsverlag Winter.
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). [Facing up to the problem of consciousness](https://consc.net/consciousness/). *Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2*(3), 200–219.
Chalmers, D. J. (1996). [ The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory](https://consc.net/the-conscious-mind/). Oxford University Press.
Elitzur, A. C. (1989). Consciousness and the incompleteness of the physical explanation of behavior. The Journal of Mind and Behavior, 10(1), 1–19.
Elitzur, A. C. (2009). Consciousness makes a difference: A reluctant dualist’s confession. In A. Batthyany & A. C. Elitzur (Eds.), Irreducibly Conscious: Selected Papers on Consciousness (pp. 43–71). Universitätsverlag Winter.
Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11–12), 11–39. Huxley, T. H. (1874). On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history. Nature, 10, 362–366.
Jackson, F. (1982). [Epiphenomenal qualia](https://doi.org/10.2307/2960077). *The Philosophical Quarterly, 32*(127), 127–136.
Kim, J. (1998). [ Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262112345/mind-in-a-physical-world/). MIT Press.
Levine, J. (1983). [Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0114.1983.tb00207.x). *Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64*(4), 354–361.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.