The hard problem in consciousness research, the epistemic difficulty of devising bridging theories between subjective phenomena available only from a first-person perspective and the underlying neuronal mechanisms analyzable only from the third-person perspective, may not be resolvable by considering only the cognitive abilities of isolated brains. In addition, more recent concepts of embodiment that consider the embedding of the nervous system in a body endowed with receptor and effector organs may not suffice. Rather, it may be necessary to reconsider the problem in the context of social phenomena or social realities that emerged during cultural evolution. Through social interactions, realities have been created that can readily be experienced as such but that transcend the reality that existed before humans added cultural to biological evolution. These new realities have the quality of relations. They are immaterial, not tangible, not visible, not directly accessible to our senses—and yet they are perceived as real, as mental objects that humans can agree upon, that can become the object of shared attention and influence behaviour—just like the equally immaterial contents of belief systems.
What seems to pose the epistemic—the hard—problem in philosophy of mind is not so much that we perceive and have feelings and emotions, since we readily grant such abilities to animals and seem to be quite successful in identifying the neuronal substrate of these functions. The real problem appears to be our meta-awareness of having these abilities. It is this meta-awareness that has mental connotations that appear to be so difficult to relate to neuronal processes. However, this meta-awareness—which is so intimately related with what we address when we talk about consciousness—in all likelihood does not emerge naturally from the functions of an individual brain. Rather, it appears to be the consequence of experiences resulting from social interactions, just as is the case for the experience of individuality, agency, and intentionality. These are attributions that have their roots in interpersonal interactions and are probably appropriated by individuals while they are developping their self-image. Without being embedded in a differentiated socio-cultural environment, without the option of mirroring oneself in the perception of others, without reflexive interactions between persons endowed with a theory of mind, and without an exchange of reports about inner states, formulated in a symbolic language-system, we would probably not be aware of our being conscious.
Thus the phenomenon that we call consciousness has the ontological status of a social reality. It is a construct, just like all the other social realities that our cultures have brought into this world. However, this construct differs in an important respect from other social realities, such as norms, beliefs, and values, in that it is an attribution that we ascribe to ourselves. We learn from social interactions that we are endowed with the ability to be aware of being aware. After conceptualization of this novel experience it becomes an integral part of our self-image—we exchange reports on this shared experience and coin words for it.
Regarded in this way the “hard problem” may not be as hard as it seems. Analyzing individual brains will not unravel the “correlates” of the many semantic connotations of what we term consciousness, because they emerged from a reflexive interaction between individuals. But we should eventually be able to identify the neuronal mechanisms underlying the cognitive abilities that allowed human beings to create the socio-cultural environment that itself allowed for the experience of being conscious.