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Thursday, 22 March 2018



There is no hard problem of consciousness. This is because what it attempts to bring into focus does not have a solution, and hence could never have been a problem. Some might say it is not a problem because it is incorrectly posed, they will say that there is a solution, but to a somewhat different problem, and that that solution will resolve the muddle out of which this apparent problem arose. But what drove the conceiving of this problem was precisely the intuition that in principle no solution whatsoever could respond to what it is that drove the original question. When you have invested everything in a mighty problem-solver then everything had better be a problem, and so before you get down to solving or resolving it you must insist that any disquiet of the understanding is at heart nothing but a problem. So, is every disquiet of the understanding a problem? No, sometimes it is a mystery, and that means that an entirely different sort of engagement is demanded, all ingenuity to be put aside. The mystery can be lost sight of in the onrush of the triumphalism of problem solving, blind to its own confusion, but can never be overborne because it is prior to every question, is the hidden spark inside every question.

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