Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like. For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible . The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable . For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that