ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 05 February 2019 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00063 Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 February 2019 | Volume 10 | Article 63 Edited by: Ron Chrisley, University of Sussex, United Kingdom Reviewed by: Simon Bowes, University of Sussex, United Kingdom Cees van Leeuwen, KU Leuven, Belgium *Correspondence: Riccardo Manzotti riccardo.manzotti@gmail.com Specialty section: This article was submitted to Consciousness Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology Received: 15 June 2018 Accepted: 10 January 2019 Published: 05 February 2019 Citation: Manzotti R (2019) Mind-Object Identity: A Solution to the Hard Problem. Front. Psychol. 10:63. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00063 Mind-Object Identity: A Solution to the Hard Problem Riccardo Manzotti* Department of Business, Law, Economics and Consumer Behaviour, Università IULM, Milan, Italy Here I present a mind-object identity theory based on a straightforward hypothesis: One’s experience of an object is identical with the object itself. To defend this hypothesis, I will reconsider the notion of a physical object in terms of relative and actual properties. To address cases of misperception such as dreams and hallucinations, I will also reconsider the notion of present in relative terms. Both the object and the present are recast as object-relative. Keywords: consciousness, hard problem of consciousness, naturalism, hallucination, argument from illusion, physicalism, philosophy of mind INTRODUCTION I present a mind-object identity theory based on a straightforward hypothesis: One’s experience of an object is identical with the object itself. To defend this hypothesis, I will reconsider the notion of a physical object in terms of relative and actual properties, and in doing so, I will support a form of naturalism. At the outset, I’d like to stress that the proposed view is neither a form of panpsychism nor a variant of neutral monism; moreover, it does not require any emergence. The goal is showing that if nature is reconceived according to a relative notion of physical objects, consciousness will fit seamlessly into what we call the physical world. “Physicalism” is a notoriously subtle and elusive view, of which there are several variants. I agree that it is impossible to define a priori the nature of the physical (Russell, 1927; Strawson, 2017), therefore the term will be used in the context of being part of the domain of which pebbles, molecules, and radio waves are relatively uncontroversial examples. Such an approach is routinely adopted by physics—e.g., if something behaves like other physical stuff, it is taken to be part of the physical world. As a result, in this paper, anything that is located in space-time, that is causally relevant (more on this soon) and that is made of matter/energy will be taken to be physical. Thus, a packet of energy or a pebble are suitable example. Since the focus is on our experience in everyday standard situations, I will focus mostly on everyday familiar objects such as tables, rooms, clouds, and also phenomena such as rainbows, flashes, constellations and pieces of music. Many philosophers have done the same (Kim, 1998; Merricks, 2001; Brewer, 2006). The goal of the paper is to show that, by revisiting the nature of the physical world in terms of relative properties, it is possible to reveal a mind-object identity that, in contrast with the traditional mind-body identity, maintains that while consciousness is located in the physical world, it is not identical to brain processes but rather to external objects. In brief, the proposal is that, whenever a subject S experiences an object O, S’s experience is nothing but O itself. O is a relative object where relative reads as in “relative velocity” rather than as in “relative to a subject.”