There is something comical yet also quite sad about the sight of philosophers and scientists fighting it out about whether the 'hard problem' is even a problem at all. Each side is defending something they cherish against a death blow that would be delivered to it by their opponents: the collapsing of subjectivity, of the first-person perspective, as if that were a real possibility for a subject, or else the collapse of the ultimate verity of a super-human theory. They uphold or dismiss inner experience for the sake of a certain inner experience of their own, their place in a comprehensive world-picture. The sides talk past each other, in each case what is asserted ought to be blindingly obvious but somehow falls short. Those who dismiss the problem seem like those eunuch priests who castrated themselves out of love for their idol, and it is easy to fear for the debasement of a world that would accept their vision of being. Still, there is a kind of non-dual rigour to the anti position. Inner experience is always the experience of someone, and that someone, the local autobiographical self, is elusive, is never to be found at the point from which it was just looking. In the pure patency of being the sense of experience as a subjective something melts away just as surely as it does in the rigorously absolutised third-person perspective. Nevertheless the proponents of the latter retain a priestly relationship to their vaunted reality while the non-dualist merges with it in seamless equanimity.