Consciousness as Nominalization Error: Dissolving the Hard Problem via Grammatical Reform
A seventeen-page paper arguing that the hard problem of consciousness is an artefact of grammar rather than a metaphysical puzzle. The noun consciousness nominalises a verb, turning the activity of being conscious into a pseudo-object that then appears to demand explanation; repose the question as what is happening when an organism is being conscious, and what remains is an ordinary empirical question. It was written as a condensation of a longer monograph and has since been folded back into it.
Who this is for
Two readers. Someone in philosophy of mind who wants to check whether the nominalisation diagnosis is actually distinct from illusionism, heterophenomenology, higher-order theories, or Bennett and Hacker's linguistic therapy can read seventeen pages instead of eighty-seven; the standalone carries a systematic point-by-point differentiation from each that the monograph absorbs but does not foreground.
Anyone building on the property-realism trilemma or the benign-versus-pathological nominalisation criteria should cite the monograph instead, since that is where those arguments now sit in fuller form with the surrounding material. And anyone auditing the lab's record needs the relationship stated plainly, because two live deposits with overlapping titles look like two results.
The argument
The hard problem is unsolvable by construction rather than by depth. It is defined as whatever is left over after functional explanation, so no functional account can ever discharge it. That is a fact about how the question was framed, not about how deep the mystery runs.
Retreating from consciousness is a thing to phenomenal character is a property does not escape the diagnosis. The trilemma: if phenomenal properties are epistemically accessible they collapse into functional ones; if causally idle they are epiphenomenal; if causally efficacious they collapse into the physical.
Not all nominalisation is pathological, and the thesis needs that distinction or it is answerable by pointing out that temperature is nominalised too. Two criteria separate the benign case from the pathological one: convergence under investigation, and external verifiability. The argument runs on Ryle's category-error analysis and Wittgenstein's language games, and applies the same diagnostic to Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, Attention Schema Theory and predictive processing.
Which artefact to read: the monograph
This is a standalone deposit, but the dependency between the two artefacts has reversed. The standalone still describes itself in its front matter as a condensation of the monograph. In fact the monograph now carries the nominalisation thesis, the trilemma, the benign-versus-pathological criteria and the dissolution of Mary's Room, zombies and the inverted spectrum as its own sections, and that folding is visible in the deposited record rather than only in local source.
So the standalone deposit stays live and citable, but a reader who wants the argument in full should go to the monograph at 10.5281/zenodo.17917969. Citing both as separate results double-counts one argument.
It is not separately listed on any public surface: the systems.ac entry is hidden and the slug redirects to the monograph page, and dissensus.ai has no entry for it. The one thing the standalone still does better is the point-by-point differentiation from adjacent positions.
What it argues
- The hard problem is unsolvable by construction, not by depth: it is defined as the residue left after functional explanation, so no functional account can discharge it.
- The retreat to phenomenal properties does not escape the diagnosis. If they are epistemically accessible they collapse into functional properties; if causally idle they are epiphenomenal; if causally efficacious they collapse into the physical.
- Not all nominalisation is pathological. Two criteria separate the benign cases, such as the economy or temperature, from the pathological one: convergence under investigation, and external verifiability.
- The dependency has reversed. The monograph now carries these arguments as its own sections, so it is the artefact to read and cite; treating the two deposits as separate results double-counts one argument.
What this is not
- No external peer review on either artefact. Both are preprint deposits; neither has been through a journal.
- No external peer review, and an internal panel returned a revise verdict. The deposited monograph is v5 (11 July 2026); check it against the local source before assuming any particular revision has landed.
- The standalone Zenodo record carries no related identifiers, so nothing on the record tells a reader it has been absorbed, and its own deposited description links to a lab URL that now returns 404.
- Version DOIs are circulating where concept DOIs belong across the local metadata files for both artefacts, and the monograph's citation file still carries a retired title and a DOI that is neither the concept nor the current version.
Identifiers
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