Shermer’s Known Unknown…and Possibly Unknowable

Philosopher of science and broad-scope skeptic Michael Shermer puts the hard problem of consciousness “into the category of—per Donald Rumsfeld's epistemological classification system—a known unknown that may be unknowable.” He frames his approach with the deceptively simple question, “What’s It Like to be You?”, to which he responds with another question, “What’s it like to be a dolphin?”

The Impossibility of Experiencing Another Being

“How should I know?” Shermer says. “I don’t even know what it’s like to be another human, much less a bat, pace Thomas Nagel’s classic 1974 paper, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’” To know inside what it’s like to be a dolphin, Shermer continues, “if I added echolocation to my sensory systems, perhaps I would be able to ‘see’ the shapes of things with sound waves, and that would nudge me a bit closer to dolphin-ness. Strapping to my feet one of those giant monofins to serve as a tail would allow me to feel what it’s like to power through a viscous aquatic medium, which would be made all the smoother if I donned one of those rubbery Olympic full-body swimsuits to mimic the dolphin’s sleek, smooth, rubbery skin texture. Adding a snorkel that serves as a blowhole for breathing, an appetite for squid (sushi?), and the ability to make clicks and whistle sounds might nudge me further along the dolphin-ness scale” (Shermer, 2025, 2026).

But Shermer’s point is that while all this may be necessary, it is not sufficient. Because “the only way to have the full-on qualitative experience of dolphin-ness is to actually be a dolphin with all that entails anatomically, physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively. In that case, then, I would no longer be a human wondering what it’s like to be a dolphin. I’d just be a dolphin. The easy problem of consciousness would be to explain the neural wiring of the brain; the hard problem is understanding what it’s like to be the wiring.”

The reason is that “What’s it like to be a dolphin?” is logically impossible to solve because, according to Shermer, “it would violate Aristotle’s Law of Identity—A is A. Thus: A cannot also be non-A. You cannot at one and the same time be one thing (a human) and another thing (a dolphin). If I were able to shape-shift from human to dolphin, I would not retain my humanness while inside the body and brain of a dolphin. I would just be a dolphin, full stop. Asking what it’s like to be one thing precludes one from knowing what it’s like to be a different thing. It’s conceptually contradictory. Understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself.”

Dualism, Identity, and the Limits of Knowing

Shermer now makes his fundamental claim: “The hard problem’s thought experiment of wondering what it’s like to be something,” he says, “is also conceptually flawed in that it implies a form of dualism, in which my soul or homunculus or mini-me transports into the body of a dolphin to experience its physical and mental state of being. This is not possible because there is no ghost in the machine, no soul in the body, and no mind in the brain, as if these are different entities that can separate and travel elsewhere.”

Shermer states that it is an “essentialism about the self” that “leads us to intuitively feel like we have a soul or mind that is separate from the body and brain. So we get the humor of films like All of Me, in which the gendered soul of Steve Martin’s character switches places with that of Lili Tomlin so that each knows what it’s like to be the other sex (with all the gender-bending comedy that follows); or the film Freaky Friday, in which the teenage essence of Lindsay Lohan swaps places with the middle-aged mom essence of Jamie Lee Curtis, and hilarity ensues as the middle-aged mom is suddenly filled with teenage angst mingling with her youthful peers, and the immature teenager suddenly finds herself in adult situations for which she is ill-equipped.”

Novelists have explored similar themes, Shermer continues. “In Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a man falls asleep and wakes up as a giant insect, while his human personality remains intact inside the bug. But that is not what would happen. After the metamorphosis from human to arthropod, the essence of humanness would simply dissolve away while the essence of cockroach takes its place. Most people are dualists because dualism is intuitive—it just feels like there is something else inside of us, in the same way that the thoughts floating around up there in our skulls feel like our mind is separate from our brain, as reflected in our language when we use phrases such as ‘my body aches’ (rather than ‘I ache’) or ‘my mind is muddled’ (rather than ‘I am muddled’), as if ‘my’ and ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are separate things” (Bloom, 2004).

Not everyone agrees that the hard problem of consciousness is an insoluble one, Shermer says. In psychology and neurophysiology labs, neuroscientists continue working on the problem. But there’s still the fundamental problem of identity, Shermer reiterates, and the “what it’s like” problem, addressed from another angle by the psychiatrist Ralph Lewis when he notes that “as soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world” (Lewis, 2023). That is, how can something or someone outside of something or someone know what it’s like inside that system?

Shermer concludes that “the hard problem is asking of us a question that is impossible to answer: what’s it like to be the neural wiring? That is, what’s it like to be you? How should I know? I’m not you and never can be. I can imagine what it’s like to be you, and I can apply the Copernican Principle to myself—I’m not special—and reasonably infer that your internal states are similar to mine if I see in your actions and emotions patterns similar to those that I express. But the final step of knowing what it’s actually like to be you—or a dolphin or bat or anything—is one thought too many. Only you can experience you” (Shermer, 2025, 2026).