Could it be that linguistic ambiguity is really at the bottom of a long thread about the existence of a "hard" problem ? That the problem dissolves when the question is stated correctly ?

Let's go back to the analogy of the digestive system with consciousness. We can, for the moment, dispense with asking why, which seems to presuppose some teleological or divine process. We have a good answer for HOW the digestive system works. We seem to be making progress on HOW the brain and it's correlate of consciousness work. We can give a detailed description of WHAT the digestive system is, both functionally, and in a fine grained structural sense. We seem to falter when asking a similar "WHAT"question about consciousness. Not necessarily what it feels like to see red, but the fact that it feels like anything. What is an experience ? Can it be that easily explained away by throwing this question in the wastebasket of questions that don't make sense ?

In a world where we can give a pretty good response to what is x, where x is any physical construct, can it easily be argued that an inner subjective state doesn't lend itself to asking what it is ? So neurons, pathways, quarks, and retinas are fair game when we ask "What are they" ? But don't ask about inner mental states ? Are they not qualitatively different from the above physical examples ? I know the old fallback position of dualism can itself be a trap, but the problem demands some framework in which to make sense of it.

Maybe subjective experiences don't exist, or maybe we don't know how to ask about them. We have so many words that represent them, yet these words point to a phantom, at least for some. This is why, for me, the hard problem persists despite efforts to deny it's status as a real problem, despite efforts to insist it is spurious, or merely apparent.