2026/07/29 by Katarzyna Celka, Michał Wyrwa, Maciej Raś
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Philosophy and Theoretical Science
paper · doi:10.1080/09515089.2026.2710862
openalex publication_date 2026/07/29 · openalex created_date 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The conviction that people recognize consciousness as radically difficult to explain is popular in the contemporary philosophical debate concerning consciousness. Among multiple questions revolving around this so-called “meta-problem of consciousness,” we find one of great importance: how universal problem intuitions are, i.e. how widespread the perception of consciousness as difficult to explain is. In this paper, we have two goals. First, to check if results for Polish natives would resemble the previous outcomes for English-speaking participants, and second, to propose a novel approach to interpreting empirical data. Following the previous study by Rodrigo Díaz described in his paper “Do People Think Consciousness Poses a Hard Problem? Empirical Evidence on the Meta-problem of Consciousness” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 28(3–4) 2021), we asked participants to rate the possibility of epistemic and metaphysical reduction of two phenomena: pain and water. The obtained results show no cross-cultural differences when compared to the previous research. Regarding the interpretations of earlier empirical results that supported the lack of folk problem intuitions, we argue that both these earlier results and our results suggest the very opposite. There is indeed a meaningful sense in which laypeople view consciousness as hard to explain.