The first feature, which we can call immediacy, concerns the way we access
consciousness from the first-person perspective. Conscious states are accessed in a
seemingly unmediated way. It appears that nothing comes between us and our
conscious states. We seem to access them simply by having them—we do not infer
their presence by way of any evidence or argument. This immediacy creates the
impression that there is no way we could be wrong about the content of our
conscious states. Error in perception or error in reasoning can be traced back to poor
perceptual conditions or to a failure of rational inference. But in the absence of such
accessible sources of error, it seems that there is no room for inaccuracy in the
introspective case. And even if we come to believe we are in error in introspection,
the evidence for this will be indirect and third-personal—it will lack the subjective
force of immediacy. Thus, there is an intuition of special accuracy or even
infallibility when it comes to knowing our own conscious states. We might be wrong
that an object in the world is really red, but can we be wrong that it seems red to us?
But if we cannot be wrong about how things seem to us and conscious states seem
inexplicable, then they really are inexplicable. In this way, the immediacy of the
subjective component of consciousness underwrites the hard problem.
But what we access may be even more problematic than how we access it: we might,
after all, have had immediate access to the physical nature of our conscious states
(see P.M. Churchland 1985). But conscious experience instead reveals various
sensory qualities—the redness of the visual experience of an apple or the painfulness
of a stubbed toe, for example. But these qualities seem to defy informative
description. If one has not experienced them, then no amount of description will
adequately convey what it’s like to have such an experience with these qualities. We
can call this feature of the qualitative component of consciousness indescribability.
If someone has never seen red (a congenitally blind person, for example), it seems
there is nothing informative we could say to convey to them the true nature of this
quality. We might mention prototypical red objects or explain that red is more
similar to purple than it is to green, but such descriptions seem to leave the quality
itself untouched. And if experienced qualities cannot be informatively described,
how could they be adequately captured in an explanatory theory? It seems that by
their very nature, conscious qualities defy explanation. This difficulty lies at the
heart of the hard problem.