To understand the core issue to the so called “hard problem of consciousness”, consider how the word red, is not red.  Since this is an abstract name, In order to know what this means, you need to be able to interpret it back to a set of physical qualities.  But which physical qualities?

Perception is an interpretation process.  If you know something, there must be something physical that is that knowledge.  We interpret physical properties, like the properties of the surface of the strawberry, as a different set of physical qualities, our knowledge of the strawberry.  It is our physical knowledge of the strawberry that has the redness quality we are directly aware of.

To understand how abstract science is blind to these qualities, consider another abstract set of information, like the name “glutamate”, and our abstract descriptions of how glutamate behaves in synapses.  It is a hypothetical possibility, that needs to be falsified, that the word red, the name glutamate, and our descriptions of how glutamate behaves in a synapse, should all be interpreted as descriptions of a redness physical quality we can be directly aware of.

Now consider how all the difficult questions about consciousness like: “How do we bridge the explanatory gap?”, “How do we resolve “Inverted spectrum” issues?”, “What is it like to be a bat?”, “What did abstract Mary learn?”, “Can Computers Be Conscious?”,

“How do we eff ineffable qualia?”… are all now objectively answerable, given the realization that the word red is not red.