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.
People's intuitions about whether consciousness is physical or non-physical shift depending on how the question is framed, similar to a visual illusion. In two experiments, when asked about a scenario where a person's body is duplicated, most people said the copy would not share the original's conscious states, reflecting a dualist view. But when asked about Mary, a neuroscientist who learns color for the first time, people expected her new color experience to appear on a brain scan, reflecting a physicalist view. This inconsistency is traced to two cognitive biases—intuitive Dualism and Essentialism—suggesting that such intuitions are unreliable guides to the nature of consciousness.