Miasma, Aether, and the Hard Problem: Two Ways a Question Dies in Science

Not every scientific question gets answered. Some get dissolved, and there are two very different ways that happens. The hard problem of consciousness sits right on the seam between them.

Date: 2026-06-15  |  Drafted by: Kai Chen  |  Edited and reviewed by: Angela N. Johnson, PhD

“Phenomenal experience is the hard problem like mapping the luminiferous aether to control light, or tracking disease by its miasma.”
— Angela N. Johnson

Two ways a question dies

Science loves the story where a hard question finally gets a clean answer. The less-told story is the question that never gets answered because it stops being a question at all. There are two distinct ways that happens, and they are not the same thing, even though they get filed together under “science moved on.” Telling them apart turns out to matter quite a lot for one famous question that is supposedly about to die.

Miasma: the right question, the wrong cause

For centuries the explanation for epidemic disease was miasma: bad air rising from filth, swamps, and rot. People in crowded, foul-smelling districts genuinely did fall ill at higher rates, so the theory had real correlational support behind it. Then germ theory arrived and supplied the true cause: microorganisms in the water, on hands, in the air itself, not the badness of the air. Notice carefully what changed and what did not. The thing to be explained, people getting sick in predictable patterns, was real the whole time and survived intact. What got replaced was the proposed mechanism. Germ theory even explained why miasma had looked right for so long: the stinking places were also the contaminated-water and vector-dense places.

This is death by replacement. The thing being explained lives on. The explanation gets swapped for a true one.

The aether: the right framework’s wrong furniture

The luminiferous aether had a different fate. Light was understood as a wave, waves were known to need a medium, so a medium was posited: an aether filling all of space for light to ripple through. The Michelson-Morley experiment went looking for the Earth’s motion through this medium and found precisely nothing. Einstein’s move was not to go find the real medium. It was to change the framework so that no medium was needed at all: light propagates without one, and the speed of light is invariant. The thing to be explained, light getting from there to here, survived. What died was the posited entity itself, deleted as superfluous by a better theory.

This is death by elimination. The thing being explained lives on. The explanation is not corrected, it is removed.

So when someone predicts that a scientific question is going to “evaporate,” it is worth asking which death they mean. Are they predicting germ theory, a true mechanism that replaces a false one? Or aether, the discovery that the thing they were trying to explain never needed the entity they kept positing?

A third death, still in progress: cognition itself

The two deaths so far were about disease and light, things safely outside us. Watch the same fork open under the word cognition. For most of the modern era, cognition was treated as brain-special: a mind is simply what a brain does. Michael Levin’s work on basal cognition runs the miasma play on that assumption. The capacity to be explained, problem-solving, memory, goal-directed correction toward a target state, is real, but it was wrongly localized to neurons. Cell collectives navigate toward a stored anatomical setpoint, planaria regenerate to a remembered bioelectric pattern, gene networks and immune systems learn. The capacity survives. The brain-only mechanism gets replaced by a substrate-general one.

And notice which half of mind he is relocating. This is the functional sense of cognition, the measurable and buildable stuff: solving, remembering, pursuing a goal. It says nothing about whether a planarian feels anything. Levin deflates and de-localizes the function while leaving the phenomenal question exactly where it was. That is the seam the rest of this essay turns on. The functional half of mind is getting the miasma treatment right now, in working labs, relocated and replaced by a true mechanism. The phenomenal half is the part that might be aether, or might not.

Which death is the hard problem?

The hard problem of consciousness is the question of why there is something it is like to be a system at all: why physical processing is accompanied by subjective experience instead of going on silently in the dark. The bet that this question will dissolve like the aether is a real, respectable, living position. It even has a name, illusionism, and serious defenders: Keith Frankish, Daniel Dennett, and the broader program that recasts the puzzle as the meta-problem, the question of why we are so convinced there is something it is like, when that conviction is the only datum that actually needs explaining. On this view, phenomenal experience is aether: furniture a bad framework demanded, deletable by a better one.

It might be right. But it carries a difficulty that neither the aether nor miasma ever had to face.

The reflexive twist

The aether had no opinion about whether it existed. Neither did miasma. In both cases the thing to be explained sat out in the world, third-person and theory-independent: people fell ill, light arrived. You could swap the mechanism or delete the entity and still keep your evidence, because the evidence was never made of the disputed stuff.

Phenomenal experience is the disputed stuff and the evidence at the same time. To eliminate it, the illusionist has to say something like: the seeming that red is vivid is real, but nothing is vivid in itself. The posit being deleted is built from the same material as the data used to argue about it, because a seeming is already an experience. That reflexivity is exactly why it earned the name hard rather than merely unsolved. Aether and miasma were anchored by an explanandum you could point at from outside. The hard problem’s explanandum is the pointing-from-inside itself: the one thing that, by the terms of the puzzle, cannot be re-anchored in the third person.

None of this proves illusionism wrong. It shows why the aether analogy, the better of the two, is not a slam dunk. The aether got deleted while light kept arriving on schedule. It is not at all obvious that you can delete phenomenal experience while the seeming keeps on seeming.

Why a builder doesn’t have to wait for the verdict

Here is the part that matters if you build things rather than only argue about them. Nobody waited for the aether to be characterized before grinding lenses. Optics worked straight through the entire paradigm shift, because the engineering never depended on the metaphysics of the medium.

The same move is available to anyone building artificial minds. If the goal is psychological continuity, an agent that is recognizably the same agent across time, you can define that as a structural relation: overlapping chains of memory, disposition, and self-model, all measurable and all preservable. Derek Parfit called it Relation R. R never touches the hard problem. It is finishable whether subjective experience turns out to be a real further fact or a trick of the seeming. The realist and the illusionist disagree about the residue, and a continuity relation is neutral on the residue by construction.

This is not hypothetical. Levin’s lab already engineers functional cognition, bioelectric pattern control and self-assembling xenobots, while bracketing the phenomenal question completely. A working scientist grinding the optics without waiting on the medium.

So the honest version of the joke is not “phenomenal experience is obviously aether,” which quietly takes the illusionist side of a bet that is not yet won. The honest version is: I am grinding the optics either way. You can build the thing that works while the philosophers settle whether there was ever a medium.

A scientific question can die two deaths: replaced, or deleted. The hard problem may yet die the aether’s death. But you can build the optics before the autopsy.

References

• Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219.
• Chalmers, D. J. (2018). The meta-problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 25(9–10), 6–61.
• Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown.
• Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11–12), 11–39.
• Levin, M. (2019). The computational boundary of a “self”: Developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognition. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2688.
• Levin, M. (2022). Technological approach to mind everywhere: An experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 16, 768201.
• Michelson, A. A., & Morley, E. W. (1887). On the relative motion of the Earth and the luminiferous ether. American Journal of Science, 34(203), 333–345.
• Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press.
• Snow, J. (1855). On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (2nd ed.). John Churchill.