The Hard Problem of Consciousness and Patriarchy (work in progress) 

While I am aware this isn't a new position, what I do think may be new is that I observed the structure and dynamic of consciousness, reality and experience as Cohesion, Differentiation, Integration from within lived experience. 

I think it's possible feminism has gestured towards the idea that patriarchy may be connected with the hard problem of consciousness, but since society at large operates on biased views of women, and since the idea of consciousness being fundamental has been so heavily resisted, I am not sure how visible the connection is. 

I would also find it irrational of society to argue against this connection given that philosophy and science are a body of work built by men, who, whether we like it or not, lived in a far more patriarchally entrenched society and everything is downstream from there. 

The structure and dynamic of Consciousness, Reality and Experience that I observed through lived experience, and explored on this site do not have a hard problem, because from where I am standing Experience was never separate from the structure to begin with, for a hard problem to arise. Integration is the movement and expression of Cohesion. Coherence is the state Integration maintains and Experience is the expression of that coherence - the registration of the structure's own state from within. There is nothing to explain about why experience exists, because experience is not added to the structure, but the structure's state from within. 

Qualia - the specific felt quality of experience - are not mysterious additions to the structure requiring explanation. They are integrated affective-cognitive patterns built through the history of the field's encounters with specific configurations of reality. The felt quality of any experience carries the compressed affective registration of everything the field has encountered around that stimulus - its intensity, its associations, its relational history. The redness of red carries evolutionary history stabilised through repeated affective registration into a relatively consistent qualitative character across people. The taste of coffee varies between people precisely because the affective history around it varies - the same chemical compounds producing entirely different qualitative experiences depending on what the field has integrated around that stimulus. The felt character isn't separate from the pattern's history. It is that history, registered from within the field as a coherent whole, with an intensity proportional to the depth of the original affective registration. There is no explanatory gap between stimulus and felt quality because affect was never separate from the structure to begin with. The question "why does it feel like something" only arises if feeling is assumed to be the mysterious extra ingredient rather than the primary registration of the field's own state. Once affect is structural, qualia are what integrated patterns feel like from inside the field - nothing more is required.

The hard problem itself arises within patriarchal logic that renders affect, and feeling implicitly, as inferior to cognitive processes - excluding it entirely from the structure and dynamic of consciousness. While I have no formal knowledge, from where I am looking, philosophy of mind - the branch of philosophy society has rendered as supposedly concerning itself with the study of consciousness - is exactly just that: philosophy of mind, and not philosophy of consciousness. It's not a coincidence that the field studying consciousness arrived at an explanatory gap - it studied the mind, a cognitive system, as if it represented the quintessence of consciousness, and then found that experience resisted that framework. 

The hard problem is not technical, but epistemic. It's not 'how does matter produce subjective experience?', but 'why do we refuse to treat a core component of the structure and dynamic of consciousness, experience, reality themselves as real in its own right?'. Experience itself ends up defaulted to inferiority and this creates a gap that must be explained away, and when that inevitably fails patriarchal logic calls it 'hard'. 

The problem that patriarchal logic created isn't that it valued cognition, but that it valued it at the expense of affect, treating affect as noise rather than the primary data cognition is supposed to be faithful to. Cognition severed from affect is generating a structure that isn't faithful to what is actually registered, and from my position it is no wonder that experience is this mystery phenomenon that must be explained.

This is what happens in systems that model hierarchy, systems where feeling became inferior, experience became derivative, interiority an embarrassment and not a legitimate mode of access to reality. If affect is systematically excluded from the ontology, treating it as subjective noise, epiphenomenal and not real data then it's only natural to be left with an explanatory gap. The hard problem is an artifact of the exclusion, and not a mystery about the nature of things.

The same logic that treats feeling as inferior to reason, that ranks abstraction over embodiment, and defines rigor as the removal of the subjective, is the same logic that historically positioned the feminine, the emotional, the relational as less real and less worthy of serious consideration. It's not a coincidence that the dominant philosophical tradition that can't solve consciousness is the same one that spent centuries devaluing the mode through which I observed consciousness most directly registering itself. The hard problem is a symptom of a structurally distorted epistemology that amputated feeling from its account of reality and then couldn't figure out where experience went.

If our entire cultural script revolves around feelings as unreliable, something to be managed or overridden by reason, then individuals can't develop the capacity to read it accurately either. Everyone receives the signal but was trained to distrust it. The translation from feeling to thought becomes lossy and distorted. People walk around with all this affective data they're not consciously processing and integrating, and we wonder why we feel disconnected, anxious, and depressed.

It compounds, because when we can't track our own feelings accurately, we can't track anyone else's either. Empathy isn't some mystical capacity, but the ability to register coherence in another person's field. Women have been socialised to carry the emotional labour and read everyone's field, while men were socialised to externalise and deffer affective signals, discomfort, and accountability regardless if the cause lies within. 

It's no wonder statistics show women are 'naturally' more empathetic than men. Dehumanising behaviors are not just 'bad behavior' but a structural distortion of reality that was created by the very system that oppresses women(=emotional=bad). The system suppresses affect but affect doesn't disappear and operates unintegrated - without the cognitive differentiation needed to articulate and express it adequately. It thus becomes the very thing the system accused it of being: chaotic, irrational, unmanageable. The system creates the dysfunction it then points to as evidence that it was right to suppress affect in the first place, becoming a self-reinforcing loop.

A culture that systematically devalues feeling isn't just producing emotionally illiterate individuals, but a collective that can't integrate properly. The mainstream narrative is 'Move on', 'It will pass', while the culture keeps generating differentiation, more complexity and more demand for processing without placing appropriate value on the corresponding capacity to hold it in coherent relation.

We have relationships, institutions, cultures that are operating on distorted translations and making decisions on distorted, partial data and then calls it objectivity. The hard problem came to be a thing because of epistemic bias introduced by a system that renders cognition as superior and devalues feeling.   

The irony of treating consciousness itself as an unreliable witness when that unreliability was introduced by the structure of the system itself.

I don't imagine my logic is objective or rational enough though. It surely reads as too emotional, or downright hysterical.