There is a pattern in the history of physics. A puzzle appears insoluble for generations. Brilliant minds propose baroque solutions — new entities, hidden mechanisms, radical revisions to metaphysics. Then someone notices that the puzzle rested on an unexamined assumption. Remove the assumption, and the puzzle doesn’t get solved. It dissolves.

I want to suggest that David Chalmers’ "hard problem" of consciousness — the question of why physical processes generate subjective experience at all — may be the next candidate for this treatment.

Einstein’s Move

Before 1905, physicists faced a genuine puzzle about light. Maxwell’s equations predicted that electromagnetic waves travel at a fixed speed. But speed relative to what? If you chase a light beam, shouldn’t it slow down from your perspective? The natural answer was to posit an absolute reference frame — the luminiferous ether—against which light’s speed could be measured.

The ether created problems. Experiments failed to detect it. Worse, the mathematics required to preserve it grew increasingly contrived. Lorentz and others developed transformation equations that worked, but their physical meaning remained obscure.

Einstein dissolved the puzzle by removing the hidden assumption. There is no absolute reference frame. The speed of light is the same for all observers not because of some compensating mechanism, but because simultaneity itself is relative. Two events that appear simultaneous to one observer occur at different times for another. Neither observer is wrong. Both descriptions are correct, relative to their respective frames.

The puzzle of the ether didn’t get solved. It evaporated. Once you accept that physical descriptions are always made from some reference frame, asking what really happens "in absolute terms" becomes meaningless.

Rovelli’s Move

Quantum mechanics presents its own puzzle. A particle exists in a superposition of states until measured, then "collapses" into a definite value. But what counts as a measurement? When exactly does collapse occur? Does consciousness play some special role?

These questions generated decades of interpretive controversy: many worlds, hidden variables, objective collapse theories. Each attempt to specify when and how quantum states become definite ran into difficulties.

Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics dissolves the puzzle by making the same move Einstein made. There is no absolute quantum state. The state of a system is always relative to another system. When a particle and a measuring device interact, the particle acquires a definite property relative to that device. A third system that hasn’t yet interacted with either will still describe the particle-plus-device in superposition. Neither description is wrong. Both are correct, relative to their respective perspectives.

The measurement problem doesn’t get solved. It evaporates. Once you accept that quantum states are always relational, asking when collapse "really" happens becomes meaningless. The question assumed an observer-independent state that doesn’t exist.

The Hard Problem

Chalmers posed the hard problem in 1995 to distinguish it from the "easy" problems of consciousness — explaining how the brain integrates information, controls attention, reports mental states. These yield to functional analysis. Explain the right causal mechanisms and you’ve explained the function.

The hard problem asks something different: why does any of this feel like anything? Even a complete account of how neurons process visual information leaves unexplained why seeing red has a qualitative character—a "redness" — rather than proceeding in experiential darkness. A philosophical zombie, physically identical to you but with no inner experience, seems at least conceivable. This conceivability, Chalmers argued, reveals that functional explanation and phenomenal experience are logically distinct.

For thirty years, this has seemed like a genuine puzzle. Some propose new fundamental entities (panpsychism). Others deny that qualia exist at all (eliminativism). Still others place hope in future physics we cannot yet imagine. The debate continues because the hard problem seems to resist the standard scientific move of explaining wholes in terms of parts.

But perhaps the puzzle rests on a hidden assumption.

The hard problem is framed as follows: we have objective physical facts about brain processes, and we have subjective phenomenal facts about experience. The puzzle is how to get from the first to the second.

But what if "objective physical facts" is already a confused notion? What if physical descriptions — like temporal ordering in relativity, like quantum states in RQM — are always relative to some observer?

Rovelli insists that RQM does not privilege consciousness. Any physical system can serve as the reference point for a relational description. A photomultiplier tube, a cat, a human brain — all are equally valid anchors for describing the states of other systems relative to them.

This seems to avoid making consciousness fundamental. But consider what it implies. If all physical facts are relational facts — facts about how one system appears to another — then there is no "view from nowhere." Every physical description is already a description from some perspective.

The hard problem presupposed a contrast between objective physical description (the view from nowhere) and subjective experience (the view from here). If the view from nowhere doesn’t exist—if physics was always perspectival—then the contrast collapses.

First Person and Third Person as Equally Valid Descriptions

Here is the key claim. When I observe your brain activity using an fMRI, I obtain a third-person description of neural events. When you introspect on your experience, you obtain a first-person description of the same events. The hard problem assumes these are descriptions of different things — physical states versus phenomenal states — and asks how one generates the other.

But suppose they are descriptions of the same relational facts from different relational perspectives.

You stand inside the system. The neural events constitute your perspective; they are the reference frame from which you describe the rest of the world. What this looks like from the inside — what it is like to be that reference frame — is phenomenal experience.

I stand outside the system. The neural events appear to me as correlations between your brain states and environmental stimuli. What this looks like from the outside is the functional organization that neuroscience studies.

Neither description is more fundamental. Neither captures "what’s really happening" while the other merely approximates. They are complementary perspectives on the same relational structure, just as two observers in relative motion give complementary descriptions of the same events in spacetime.

Consciousness, on this view, is not a thing to be explained. It is what physical processes look like from the inside — from the perspective of the system that those processes constitute. The hard problem asks how to derive the inside view from the outside view. But you cannot derive one perspective from another any more than you can derive what a building looks like from the south by knowing only what it looks like from the north. Both views are correct. Neither is reducible to the other. And the building exists independently of either.

What This Explains

This framing explains several otherwise puzzling features of consciousness.

First, the explanatory gap. No amount of third-person information seems sufficient to convey what first-person experience is like. This is exactly what we should expect if first-person and third-person descriptions are irreducibly different perspectives on the same underlying reality. You cannot close the gap by piling up more information from one perspective, any more than you can derive relativistic time dilation by gathering more data about simultaneity from a single frame.

Second, the correlation between neural complexity and richness of experience. The more complex the relational structure of a system, the more "room" there is for an inside perspective to have detailed character. A thermostat has few internal relations; what it is like to be a thermostat (if anything) is correspondingly impoverished. A human brain has trillions of internal relations; the inside view is correspondingly rich.

Third, the privacy of experience. Only one system occupies the perspective that constitutes a given conscious experience. Others can observe the system from outside, but they cannot share its inside view. This is not a metaphysical mystery. It is the same reason you cannot see a scene from two different vantage points at once.

Fourth, the unity of consciousness. A single perspective integrates information into one coherent experience. This is not because some mysterious binding mechanism creates unity from disparate parts. It is because the perspective is singular by definition — a point of view just is a unified locus of description.

The Zombie Objection

Chalmers’ zombie thought experiment asks whether a being physically identical to you but lacking inner experience is conceivable. If so, physicalism seems false—there must be something beyond physical facts that gives rise to experience.

The relational view reframes this question. A zombie would be a system whose third-person description matches yours perfectly but which has no first-person description. Is this conceivable?

From the outside, we cannot tell. That is precisely the point — first-person and third-person descriptions are not derivable from each other. But from the inside, the question is incoherent. There is no way to ask whether a system has an inside perspective except by occupying that perspective. Asking whether the zombie has experience is like asking whether your twin in another reference frame "really" experiences time passing at the same rate you do. The question assumes an absolute fact where only relational facts exist.

The conceivability of zombies may show that third-person descriptions do not entail first-person descriptions. But this is consistent with the relational view. It does not show that experience is something added to physics. It shows that physics, properly understood, was always perspectival.

What Would Falsify This?

A good theory should specify conditions under which it would fail. Several findings would undermine the relational dissolution of the hard problem.

If we discovered physical facts that are genuinely observer-independent — not merely stable across observers, but having no relational character whatsoever — the analogy to RQM would break down. The whole proposal depends on relationality going all the way down.

If we found that certain physical systems with rich internal relational structure definitely lacked any form of experience — not merely reported lacking it, but demonstrably had no inside perspective — the correlation between complexity and experience would be called into question. Of course, this is extraordinarily difficult to establish, which may itself be evidence that the relational view is correct.

If the mathematical structure of consciousness turned out to require entities or principles not present in physics — if panpsychists were right that experience requires its own fundamental property — then the relational dissolution would be incomplete. Something more than perspective would be needed.

Conclusion

Einstein taught us that time and space are not absolute. They vary with the observer. Yet the underlying reality—spacetime—is consistent and describable.

Rovelli teaches us that quantum states are not absolute. They vary with the system doing the describing. Yet the underlying structure — correlations and interactions — is consistent and physical.

Perhaps consciousness follows the same pattern. The first-person character of experience is not an addition to the physical world. It is what the physical world looks like from the inside of a relational perspective—from the vantage point of a system that itself participates in the web of physical correlations.

The hard problem dissolves not because we explain how brain states generate experience. It dissolves because the question assumed a contrast between objective and subjective that was never coherent. There is no view from nowhere. There is only the view from here and the view from there, each equally valid, each describing the same relational reality from its own irreducible angle.

Consciousness, on this view, is not mysterious. It is inevitable. Wherever physical systems interact and correlate, there is a perspective from which those interactions appear as something — that something is just what interaction looks like from the inside. The universe, thoroughly relational, is saturated with points of view. We happen to be some of them.

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What evidence would most challenge this view? If you can think of cases where the analogy to RQM breaks down, I’d like to hear them.