Luuk Vierhout

The hard problem is the problem

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 22, 2026 Luuk Vierhout

The 'hard problem' of consciousness—how subjective experience arises from physical processes—is not a genuine problem but a category error that confuses classical and second-order cybernetic questions. Treating consciousness as an object to be explained from a third-person perspective misses that it is irreducibly lived from within. Through a thought experiment (Luca, a minimal system on a beach) and insights from second-order cybernetics (von Foerster, Maturana, Varela), the paper demonstrates that the 'objective' perspective presupposed by the hard problem is itself a first-person construction. The solution is not to answer the question but to expose its logical incoherence.