Relational Cuts — Paradox as a Lens on Meaning, Mind, and Reality: 4 The Hard Problem of Consciousness: Relational Cuts in Mind and Meaning

The Hard Problem of Consciousness, famously articulated by David Chalmers, asks:

Why and how do physical processes give rise to subjective experience?

Classical philosophy and neuroscience frame the problem as if consciousness were something produced by matter, a property that exists over and above neural activity. This framing generates the “hard” intractability: if consciousness is an inner object, then its relation to physical processes appears mysterious, a chasm between mind and world.

Relational ontology dissolves the problem at its source.

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1. Experience as First-Order Phenomenon

From the relational perspective:

• Experience is not an object produced by matter.

• Consciousness is a first-order phenomenon, a construal arising from relational cuts across potential.

• Phenomenal “what it is like” is not a thing to be explained; it is the actualisation of systemic potential within perspective.

In other words, consciousness does not emerge from matter; it is the relational enactment of matter-in-potential actualised as construal.

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2. System, Instance, and Construal

To articulate this precisely:

• System: the structured potential of neural, semiotic, environmental, and bodily processes.

• Instance: the perspectival actualisation — the particular configuration of potential at a moment.

• Construal: the experienced phenomenon — the first-order lived meaning.

The Hard Problem arises only if one assumes that construal is separate from system and instance. Remove that assumption, and the paradox evaporates: consciousness is the ongoing relational cut itself.

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3. Why Representationalism Creates a “Hard” Problem

Classical approaches create intractability by:

1. Treating potential as inert (a physical substrate to be explained).

2. Treating experience as an object over and above that substrate.

3. Treating knowledge of experience as if it were “access” to that object rather than the relational actualisation of potential.

Once these assumptions are corrected:

• Matter is not inert; it participates in potential.

• Experience is not objectified; it is first-order.

• Consciousness is not “hard”; it is relationally necessary.

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4. Consciousness as Relational Event

Consider a moment of seeing the morning light:

• Traditional framing: neurons fire → light is experienced → mystery arises.

• Relational framing: morning light activates systemic potential (visual system + neural configuration + social-environmental context) → relational cut occurs → consciousness is the lived phenomenon of that cut.

There is no explanatory chasm: experience is the relational instantiation of potential, not a product to be bridged.

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5. Implications for Philosophy of Mind

Relational ontology recasts the Hard Problem as a pseudo-problem:

• Consciousness is neither emergent property nor hidden object.

• Phenomena are system-instance-construal relations actualised perspectivally.

• What appeared intractable is simply the result of representational thinking.

All first-order phenomena — perception, feeling, thought — are relational enactments, cuts in the structured potential of reality, not objects awaiting explanation.

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6. Relational Cuts as the Key to Consciousness

The Hard Problem vanishes once we recognise that:

• Experience is real, not illusory.

• It is first-order, not object-like.

• It arises through relational cuts between system (structured potential) and instance (actualisation).

Consciousness is not “hard” because there is nothing missing: it is the act of relational actualisation itself.