Can Function and Experience Legitimately Be Separated?

—A Relational Critique of the “Hard Problem” of Consciousness

Abstract: Chalmers distinguishes the “easy problems” from the “hard problem” to emphasize the difference between explaining cognitive functions and explaining subjective experience. This paper questions whether that distinction at the level of description warrants a stronger claim: that any complete physical, functional, and relational explanation must leave some fact about experience unexplained. Through an analysis of tactile experience and the sense of presence in virtual reality, the paper proposes that features of sensation such as body ownership, spatial location, and the sense of reality may be constitutive of experience itself. They cannot simply be assigned in advance to the category of functional conditions external to experience. On this basis, the paper develops “consciousness as the reflexive integration of the relationship between self and environment” as a provisional theoretical hypothesis, and asks whether the hard problem arises in part from conceptually separating experience from the relations that constitute it. The paper does not claim that consciousness has already been explained. It argues that the existence of an insurmountable explanatory boundary between function and experience is itself something that must be established through argument.

There is a fact that consciousness research cannot evade: we feel. The cold of touching ice, the tension of standing at a height, and the sense of space involved in seeing an object are all experiences that actually occur. Any theory of consciousness must account for them. It cannot simply declare its work complete on the grounds that it has described neural activity or behavioral responses.

Yet acknowledging that experience requires explanation does not commit us to accepting that a particular division of the problem has correctly captured how experience exists. We can take subjective experience seriously while also asking whether a certain way of framing the question imposes insufficiently justified constraints on the answer. Does this happen when we distinguish experience from the relations among sensation, body, action, and environment, and then ask why experience “accompanies” those relations?

Chalmers’s hard problem needs to be examined at precisely this level.

In his 1995 paper, Chalmers calls the explanation of functions such as discrimination, information integration, reporting, and behavioral control the “easy problems.” The “hard problem” concerns why these processes involve subjective experience. “Easy” does not mean that the research is straightforward in practice. It means that such problems have an identifiable path toward mechanistic explanation. The hard problem, by contrast, asks why the operation of a mechanism has a quality that is experienced. “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” https://consc.net/papers/facing.html

This distinction does clarify a common confusion: explaining how someone reports pain does not automatically explain the experience of pain. It prevents consciousness research from too readily substituting an account of some capacity for the whole explanatory task. But showing that a particular explanation is inadequate and demonstrating that an entire class of explanations is inadequate in principle are different philosophical undertakings.

A critique of Chalmers should meet the same standard. We cannot infer that he keeps redefining consciousness merely because he continues to insist that subjective experience remains a problem. The relevant distinction was already present in his early work, and he later explicitly acknowledged that vision, attention, and memory can each have both functional and experiential aspects. “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness” https://consc.net/papers/moving.html

The question worth pursuing, then, is not whether he recognizes consciousness in sensation. It is why explaining the functional organization of sensation and explaining its subjective character must be treated as two tasks that, in principle, no single explanation can accomplish.

The experience of touching ice makes the issue clearer.

We can describe changes in skin temperature, receptor responses, the transmission of neural signals, and the behavior of withdrawing the hand or maintaining contact. These descriptions are meaningful. But a particular sensation of cold is not an isolated quality with no location, no sense of belonging to a body, and no context. Usually, I feel that some part of my hand is touching a cold object. How long the contact lasts, how the pressure changes, and whether I can move my hand away all enter into the organization of this experience.

The expressions “my hand,” “is touching,” and “that object” do not mean that the subject must first formulate these judgments in words. Someone may never explicitly think about body ownership or the source of an action, yet already experience the contact through a certain sense of bodily location. These relations can be implicit in the organization of sensation.

This gives us reason to propose a hypothesis: the functional organization of sensation may already help constitute sensation itself. Bodily location, the manner of contact, temporal continuity, and possibilities for action may not merely be external conditions that allow an independently identifiable sensation to arise. They may be part of what makes this sensation the particular sensation it is.

Describing everyday experience does not prove this hypothesis. We still need to distinguish relations that constitute experience from those that merely elicit or modulate it. The hypothesis matters because it opens another explanatory direction: before asking why function is accompanied by sensation, we should investigate the relationship between what we call function and what we call sensation.

Nor should “function” be understood too narrowly here. Chalmers’s use of the term is not limited to simple stimulus and response; it can include complex internal integration and causal organization. A relational account therefore cannot merely rename “function” as “relation” and declare that it has escaped his critique. It must make a more substantive claim: certain forms of relational organization may be the way experience exists. That possibility must be assessed through explanation and argument, rather than excluded in the initial classification of the problem.

A similar direction is already present in sensorimotor theory. O’Regan and Noë seek to understand visual experience through the subject’s mastery of sensorimotor regularities, emphasizing the relationship between seeing and exploring an environment. The adequacy of their theory remains open to dispute, but it shows that relations involving the body and action can serve as candidate resources for explaining the character of experience. “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness” https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:article:S0140525X01570119/resource/name/S0140525X01000115a.pdf

Virtual reality makes these relational questions especially concrete.

When someone puts on a VR headset, their body remains in a room, yet displays, sensors, and computer programs can make them feel that they are standing in another space. There is no corresponding physical cliff in the room, but they may still hesitate at a virtual cliff edge, feel tense, and adjust their posture.

We should be careful here about describing this as a “world that does not exist.” Virtual scenes have actual technological implementations, and whether virtual objects should count as real objects is itself a philosophical question. In his work on virtual reality, Chalmers has defended the reality of virtual objects. VR therefore cannot be treated as a counterexample that his philosophy is wholly unable to address. “The Virtual and the Real” https://consc.net/papers/virtual.pdf

The question at issue in this paper is more specific: when the room contains no physical terrain corresponding to the scene being viewed, why can that scene nevertheless become an experiential space that feels like somewhere “I am in”?

An account of the images received by the eyes is not enough to answer this question. How the visual scene changes when the subject turns their head, how the positions of objects update when the body moves, and whether the hand they see corresponds to their actual movements all help organize the experience of “where I am,” “what belongs to my body,” and “whether this is a space I can enter.”

Slater’s research on presence in VR distinguishes the feeling of being in a place from the feeling that events are actually happening, and identifies the importance of sensorimotor relations to the former. Participants can know perfectly well that they are using virtual reality while still feeling located within the scene. “Place Illusion and Plausibility Can Lead to Realistic Behaviour in Immersive Virtual Environments” https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/year4VEs/Resources/Slater2009RoyalSoc.html

Research on virtual bodies also shows that, under particular experimental conditions, synchronizing the movement of a virtual hand with that of a real hand, or synchronizing visible contact with tactile stimulation of the body, can strengthen the experience that the virtual hand belongs to oneself. Disrupting this correspondence weakens the relevant effects. “Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body” https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.01.029.2009/full

At a minimum, these studies show that body ownership and the sense of spatial location are not fixed features of the experiential background. They change as relational organization changes. The experience we need to explain therefore cannot be captured solely by asking whether there is any feeling at all. How sensation has a location, how it belongs to a particular body, and how it presents a world one can enter are also questions about consciousness.

Still, the fact that changes in relations accompany changes in experience does not establish that those relations are experience. Chalmers can accept these experimental findings and understand them as regular connections between functional organization and experience. VR’s philosophical value lies in providing a setting in which the organization of experience can be experimentally manipulated. It does not directly settle the dispute among functionalism, relational accounts, and property dualism.

Even so, these studies make a simple division questionable. If the spatiality, body ownership, object-directedness, and sense of reality of experience all change with relational organization, then an account that places every explanation of these features on the “functional” side while leaving “experience itself” on the other side owes us an explanation. What, exactly, is preserved on that other side, and why can explanations on the first side not progressively reach it?

Experience certainly has the character of being actually lived through. The dispute concerns whether this character has already been shown to be an additional fact that must be supplied separately.

We can distinguish three claims of increasing strength here. We can describe function and experience using different concepts. Existing functional explanations have not adequately accounted for experience. No possible functional or relational explanation could ever adequately account for experience. An earlier claim does not automatically entail a later one. Moving from the inadequacy of current explanations to the impossibility of explanation in principle requires further reasons.

Circularity arises if consciousness is defined in the course of an argument as “whatever remains after every functional explanation is complete,” and the argument then concludes that “functional explanation cannot explain consciousness.” Explanatory inexhaustibility has already been built into the definition; the conclusion merely repeats that stipulation.

But this is a form of argument to guard against, not a verdict we can simply pass on Chalmers’s philosophy as a whole. He does not rely solely on such a definition. He also advances arguments from conceivability and modality: if a world with all the same physical facts but no experience is genuinely possible, then physical facts do not exhaust all facts. In his more detailed treatment, he also distinguishes prima facie conceivability from conceivability under ideal reflection. “The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism” https://consc.net/papers/2dargument.pdf

A rigorous critique of the hard problem must therefore examine the premises of these arguments. Can we really conceive consistently of experience being absent once we fully understand all the relevant structures? Or does our incomplete understanding of those structures make it seem possible to retain everything while removing feeling? Neither side’s intuition can simply bring the dispute to an end.

A relational account likewise cannot offer “the complete set of relations must itself be experience” as an unargued answer. That would merely beg the question in the opposite direction. Both sides should explain what supports or challenges such a constitutive relationship, rather than build “there must be a remainder” or “there can be no remainder” into their respective starting points.

It is also necessary to clarify that Chalmers need not claim that, in the actual world, experience can vary arbitrarily independently of functional organization. His argument for “organizational invariance” supports a determinate connection between experience and fine-grained functional organization, while distinguishing determination under the laws of nature from logical or metaphysical necessity. “Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia” https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

Merely showing that sensation depends on relations involving the body and environment is therefore insufficient to refute him. The real dispute is why these relations should be treated only as conditions accompanying experience, rather than as resources for a constitutive explanation of experience itself.

Following this question, we can propose “consciousness as the reflexive integration of the relationship between self and environment” as a working hypothesis.

Reflexivity here need not mean that the subject explicitly thinks, “I am having an experience.” It refers first to a form of organization: as the system processes environmental changes, it also incorporates its own location, bodily state, the source of its actions, and their consequences into interrelated processes. Self and environment are not processed separately and then assembled. The system’s apprehension of the environment is already organized by its own state, while its apprehension of its own state is continually adjusted through its relationship with the environment.

This formulation is not yet a sufficient definition of consciousness. A thermostat can also regulate its behavior in response to its own state and changes in its surroundings. Feedback or a closed loop alone clearly does not amount to a complete theory of consciousness. An account of reflexive integration needs to explain further what distinguishes the relevant kind of integration from ordinary regulation, and how that distinction corresponds to body ownership, continuity, and a subject’s perspective in experience.

The theory must also avoid another form of circularity. If “reflexivity” is explained as “the system consciously understanding its own relations,” consciousness has already slipped into the definition. For the hypothesis to have explanatory force, the relevant organizational conditions must, as far as possible, be specified without presupposing that experience is already present. They must also be open to both empirical and conceptual examination.

VR can help advance this work. It allows us to alter the correspondence between action and visual feedback, the spatial relationship between a body and a virtual body, and the temporal structure of feedback, and then observe how experience reorganizes. Research should not focus solely on whether a subject says, “This is my hand.” It should bring together bodily localization, adjustments in action, subjective descriptions, and other relevant measures to investigate whether these changes exhibit stable explanatory relationships.

The meaning of “sense of reality” also needs to remain clear. It is neither equivalent to an object actually existing in the way we take it to exist, nor equivalent to the subject’s belief that a scene is real. Someone can know that a cliff is simulated while their body nevertheless engages with the situation as if facing a cliff. In this paper, the sense of reality refers primarily to experiencing a scene as the world one currently inhabits and with which one can enter into relations.

Constrained and relatively consistent feedback can help explain this sense of reality, but it cannot simply be stipulated as a sufficient condition for it. Experiences of reality also involve surprises, conflicts, and unpredictability. What needs explaining is how a system maintains and revises its relationship with the environment amid change, rather than how all experience can be reduced to a perfect match between input and prediction.

Ordinary films, dreams, and experiences while remaining still similarly remind us that consciousness does not require an ongoing stream of feedback from external action. Comparing films with VR can reveal differences in certain kinds of presence, but it cannot exclude film viewing from consciousness. A relational account must explain how already established bodily organization, memory, and possibilities for action continue to participate in experience when there is no current interaction. It must also allow counterexamples to challenge that explanation.

Chalmers can still reply that, even if this research explains a subject’s location, body ownership, and self-representation, it has yet to explain why any of this is actually experienced.

This reply identifies an explanatory responsibility that a relational theory must shoulder, but it does not itself establish that the responsibility cannot in principle be met. Asking a theory to explain more is different from declaring that, however it develops, it can only explain functions peripheral to experience. The latter claim requires an independent argument; posing the same question once again is not enough.

At the same time, a relational theory cannot attribute every difficult question to language. It must show which obscurities its explanations resolve, which differences in experience they account for, and where they remain inadequate. If it can do no more than supply a complex mechanism and append the statement “this is consciousness,” it has advanced no further than the framework it criticizes.

The formation of the hard problem can itself also become an object of inquiry. Chalmers later introduced the “meta-problem of consciousness,” which investigates why we find consciousness particularly difficult to explain. He acknowledges that research into the mechanisms involved may help us understand consciousness, although he does not think that explaining these judgments is enough to eliminate the problem of experience. “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness” https://consc.net/papers/metaproblem.pdf

From the perspective developed here, what needs examination is whether our direct acquaintance with experience warrants our judgments about its ontological structure. That feeling occurs is one claim; that feeling must be an additional property beyond all the relevant relations is another. Certainty about the former cannot be transferred to the latter without argument.

This also sets the limits of the present critique. Tactile experience and VR have not shown that the hard problem has disappeared, and “reflexive integration” is not yet a complete theory of consciousness. Together, they support a requirement for research: explaining the organization of experience must count as part of explaining consciousness itself, while the boundary between function and experience must remain open to discussion and revision.

By formulating the hard problem, Chalmers compelled researchers to take subjective experience seriously, and this has genuine clarificatory value. The question is whether that clarification can also serve as an advance verdict on every possible explanation. If each specific feature of experiential organization is classified as a merely functional achievement once it has been explained, then the deeper research proceeds, the more readily so-called real consciousness can retreat to a position sustained only by its being “not yet explained.” What needs scrutiny is this rule of exclusion. Impressions formed in philosophical debate are not enough to establish that a definition is continually changing.

Sensation itself may already be a form of consciousness. Body ownership, spatial directedness, possibilities for action, and a sense of reality may help constitute that form. We still need to explain how they do so, how far their constitutive role extends, and which experiences such an account cannot cover. The hard problem may continue to press these demands. But the descriptive distinction between function and experience is not, by itself, enough to establish in advance that this explanatory path can never reach experience.

The difficulty of consciousness should remain. Fixing that difficulty in the form of an unbridgeable separation requires a further argument.