The 'hard problem' of consciousness—how physical bodies produce subjective experience—may arise from two innate psychological biases rather than from a genuine ontological mystery. Essentialism leads people to believe that transformative experiences are those anchored in the body, while Dualism treats the mind as separate from the physical. Five experiments with laypeople show that a conscious experience (like seeing color) is judged transformative only when it seems embodied, that gaining such an experience is seen as causing a bodily change, and that the perceived transformation correlates with both the experience's embodiment and with Dualist intuitions. These results suggest the hard problem has psychological roots, though they do not resolve whether consciousness is actually non-physical.
Consciousness is often considered a 'hard problem' because it seems distinct from the physical world. This view relies on the assumptions that people do not see consciousness as physical and that their intuitions accurately reflect reality. New experiments challenge both assumptions: in some scenarios, people view consciousness as a physical process occurring in the brain, and intuitions about the problem are linked to psychological biases, making them unreliable. The author concludes that the 'hard problem' has psychological roots, and resolving it requires understanding the mechanisms that produce these intuitions.