Part II: Identity Thesis

The Dissolution

Introduction

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The Dissolution

The hard problem asked: how do you get experience from non-experience? The answer is: you don’t need to.

Just as chemistry doesn’t emerge from non-chemistry—you have chemistry when you have the right causal organization at the chemical scale—experience doesn’t emerge from non-experience. You have experience when you have the right causal organization at the experiential scale.

The question “why is there something it’s like to be this system?” is exactly as deep as “why does chemistry exist?” or “why are there quantum fields?” I don’t know why there’s anything at all (idk if anybody does). But given that there’s anything, the emergence of self-modeling systems with integrated cause-effect structure is not mysterious—it’s typical.

The hard problem dissolves not because we answered it, but because we showed it was asking for a privilege (reduction to physics) that physics itself doesn't have.

The Hard Problem as Perceptual Artifact

The hard problem has a further wrinkle, which will become clearer after we introduce the inhibition coefficient $\iota$ later in this part. The question “why is there something it’s like to be this system?” is asked from a perceptual configuration that has already factorized experience into “physical process” and “felt quality” so thoroughly that reconnecting them seems impossible. At lower $\iota$ —in the participatory mode where affect and perception are not yet factored apart—the question does not arise with the same force. Not because it has been answered, but because the factorization that generates it has not been performed. The explanatory gap may be partly a perception-mode artifact: a consequence of the mechanistic mode’s success at separating things that, in experience, were never separate.