Language, Not Consciousness, Is the Hard Problem

The provided text, an excerpt from an essay titled "The Hard Problem Was Never Consciousness" on the Philosophics blog, argues that the central difficulty in the philosophy of mind is not consciousness itself, but rather the limitations of language used to discuss it. The author, Bry Willis, traces this idea back to 2018 when documenting the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), which posits that words like "identity," "selfhood," and "free will" cannot bear the conceptual load placed upon them. Willis critiques prominent philosophers, including Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, suggesting that Chalmers’ "hard problem of consciousness" is a linguistic artefact or "parlour trick" resulting from a failure to recognise language's inherent limits. Instead of seeking an emergent explanation for consciousness, the author proposes the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW), a relational metaphysics which, alongside LIH, aims to show what language was failing to describe, thereby demonstrating that the difficulty lies in the dictionary's limits, not a cosmic riddle.https://philosophics.blog/2025/11/24/the-hard-problem-was-never-consciousness/