Metaphysical Tunneling: Probabilities of Transient Escape from the Hard Problem

Abstract

The Hard Problem is reframed as a tetrad of mutually inconsistent metaphysical propositions. Incompatibilities among the four propositions are dispatched not through the metaphysician’s customary and futile negation of some particular statement or statements within the tetrad but by introducing flexible quantum-formal links to replace more rigid classical logic connecting the four affirmed assertions. This abstract maneuver, logically reframing the Hard Problem, is made more concrete, pictorially accessible, and empirically testable through a description of subjectivity trapped in a sombrero-shaped potential landscape’s circumferential “gutter.” The metaphysical landscape’s shape, constrained by classical logic, breaks a symmetry hidden by current ignorance of the “Theory of Everything” or TOE, long sought by physicists. The circumferential gutter’s status as a collection of metaphysical vacua, each a discrete individual sensorium, obscures subjectivity’s relationship to the TOE’s physicality. It is argued that changing the tetrad’s formal scaffolding from classical to quantum logic allows brief reversible quantum-tunneled ascents by subjectivity from the circumferential gutter of vacua toward full TOE-like symmetry at the central peak of the sombrero-shaped potential. Probabilistically ambiguous attainment of the unknown TOE’s presumably unbroken symmetry through tunneling renders subjectivity’s relationship to physicality equivocal with regard to the causal closure of physics wrought by immunization of physical laws against intrusions by shifting qualia. Casimir-like effects and the Fourier duality of qualia are suggested as research targets for this experimentally falsifiable set of hypotheses.