When the Predictive Brain Meets the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Abstract

When we say that a theory is able to account for our subjective experience, we only mean that this theory implies (i.e., predicts) that our subjective experience is indeed as it is. Several thought experiments suggest that current theories are unable to make such predictions. For example, if we had never seen the colour red in our life, these theories would not allow us to deduce (i.e., predict) what the colour red looks like. This well-known problem is often called the hard problem of consciousness (HPC). In this paper, we address this problem through the lens of the epistemological hypothesis. Under the epistemological hypothesis, the HPC no longer reflects the inability of our theories to predict first- person observations; it reflects our inability to deduce what these theories imply regarding first-person observations. The HPC then becomes an epistemological problem: If we are unable to deduce what a theory implies regarding first-person observations, how can we know whether a theory is able to account for first-person observations? The purpose of the current paper is to develop a method for solving this epistemological problem. We implement this method in the theoretical framework of predictive processing (PP).