It Was Language All Along.
This whole misadventure began sometime in 2018, when I started documenting what has now metastasised into the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. If I werenât typing this, Iâd be doing the honourable thing and finishing the index, but here we are, procrastinating with purpose. I had a suspicion, even then, that language was up to something. Something slippery. Something evasive. At first, it was just a motley catalogue of weasel words that refused to sit still long enough to be given a meaning. I should have taken the hint when the list kept expanding like a Victorian railway: terminally over-budget and convinced of its own grandeur.
But, naturally, I pressed on.
At the time I had that slow-burn itch about identity, selfhood, free will, agency â you know, the usual metaphysical tat weâre reared on like a Victorian child raised on laudanum. It wasnât that these things didnât exist; it was that the words simply couldnât bear the conceptual load we’d been piling onto them. And so I found myself in the company of philosophers who either tried to rescue these terms (Dennett, ever the valiant firefighter with a damp match), complicate them (Searle, constructing houses of cards under wind machines), or dissolve them outright (Parfit, smiling serenely as the rest of us panic).
Meanwhile, Strawson was somewhere in the corner insisting experience is all there is, Putnam was in his perennial retraction phase, and I was merely trying to keep my own conceptual apparatus from collapsing like an undercooked soufflé.
Iâll admit I had a long-standing soft spot for Dennettâs consciousness-as-emergence hypothesis. It made a certain intuitive sense at the time: pile up enough neural machinery, sprinkle in some feedback loops, and consciousness would bubble up like steam from a kettle. It felt elegant. It felt mechanistically honest. And, crucially, it made perfect sense within the inherited Realist framework I was still tacitly lugging around. Of course, experience ’emerges’ from physical processes if you start from a worldview already partitioned into physical substrates and mental phenomena waiting to be accounted for. Dennett wasn’t wrong so much as operating within the same architectural error the rest of us had been marinating in. Once I began reframing the whole encounter through mediation rather than emergence, the elegance dissolved. What had looked like metaphysics turned out to be a conceptual afterimage generated by a language that couldnât model its own limitations.
And then there was Chalmers.
Ah, the ‘hard problem’. I lost count of how many times it surfaced. Like mould. Or a debt collector. Chalmersâ dilemma â how physical processes give rise to experience â is purportedly the Mount Everest of metaphysics. Yet the more I thought about it, the more it reeked of a linguistic parlour trick. A conceptual magic eye puzzle: stare long enough and a unicorn appears, provided youâve surrendered your scepticism and a good measure of oxygen.
The problem isnât that consciousness is ‘hard’. The problem is that the linguistic scaffolding weâre using was never built for this terrain. ‘Experience’. ‘Physical’. ‘Mental’. ‘Explain’. These words pretend to be steel beams when theyâre actually damp cardboard.
What remains isnât a cosmic riddle but a linguistic artefact. A conceptual false path carved by centuries of grammatico-metaphysical enthusiasm â the unfortunate habit of mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
Which brings me to the present, having at last gelled the LIH and published the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World â a relational metaphysics that has the decency not to hallucinate substances it can’t justify. MEOW clears the fog rather neatly: the so-called ‘hard problem’ is only ‘hard’ because we continue to treat ‘mind’ and ‘world’ as two independent substances requiring metaphysical reconciliation. Together, LIH and MEOW provide a double exposure of the problem: LIH shows why the language fails; MEOW shows what the language was failing to describe.
So here we are. Iâd like to reconsider Chalmers through the dual lenses of LIH and MEOW â not to ‘solve’ the hard problem, but to show it was never the right problem to begin with. The difficulty isnât consciousness; itâs the language weâre forced to use, the same language that refuses to sit still, the same language that keeps trying to trick us into mistaking grammatical symmetry for metaphysical necessity.
In a coming post, I intend to pry open that illusion with a crowbar. Delicately, of course. One must be civilised about these things.
Because if language is insufficient â and it is â then perhaps what Chalmers discovered was not the abyss of consciousness, but the limit of the dictionary.
Philosophics 