Wanting to Be Understood Explains the Meta-Problem of Consciousness
arXiv Preprint Archive June 10, 2025 Chrisantha Fernando, Dylan Banarse, Simon Osindero
Humans are strongly motivated to be understood, leading them to create external representations such as language, art, and mime to share inner states. These external representations are necessary for access consciousness—the global availability of information for reasoning. However, the bandwidth of access consciousness is far smaller than the richness of raw experience, so no external representation can fully reproduce that richness. Ordinarily, explaining an experience only requires an audience to grasp the pattern, not relive it. But the drive to be understood and the low-level sensorimotor capacities for grasping are so strong that the demand for explaining the feel of experience cannot be satisfactory.