The Curiouser – Volume I, Issue IV (September 2026)

What if the hard problem of consciousness isn't hard because the answers are elusive, but because neuroscience has been handed the wrong questions entirely?

In Issue IV we stay inside the Mechanist Citadel but takes us somewhere most visitors don't go: the foundational paperwork wing, where four philosophers have filed a motion to interrogate the terms of the project itself. The Churchlands, Dennett, Frankish, and Schwitzgebel each argue, in their own register, that the categories consciousness research has been asked to explain may never have been real enough to explain in the first place. Some want to dissolve the hard problem, some want to quine it, and some want to audit the instrument being used to report it. Yet none of them succeed in fully closing the case.

If the Citadel's best theories couldn't cross the explanatory gap, and its most rigorous internal critics couldn't make the gap disappear, then where does the pattern of failure point?