Reversed causality has consequences that reach far beyond physics. When consciousness, experience and observation are ontologically primary — and not products of matter — many of the most difficult questions in modern philosophy and science resolve themselves. This is the first of them.

The so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness arises because modern science typically treats relation and experience as ontologically different quantities. Physics describes relations, structures and information exchange. Qualia describes experience. Once these have been separated from each other, the question arises of how subjective experience can emerge from something that in itself contains no experience.

In the EC/HE theory this problem does not arise.

Relation and experience have never been separated. From the first sensation, understanding and qualia appear simultaneously as two aspects of the same relational event. Experience is therefore not produced by relations. Experience is the experienced side of the relations themselves.

The problem therefore does not arise because experience is inexplicable. The problem arises because one attempts to explain experience after first having defined it away from the relations of which it has always been a part.

The so-called problem of consciousness therefore does not represent a deficiency in reality, but a consequence of the ontological premises one starts with. Change the premises — and the problem disappears.

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