The hard problem of consciousness, as formulated by David Chalmers, challenges us to explain subjective experiences—the mystery of qualia. But in a living, thinking universe, must this remain a mystery? If we view souls as thinkers and experiencers of thoughts, dreaming the world into existence, can we solve this riddle?

In the fall of 2019, I was studying neurofeedback, driven by a mission to improve my focus and concentration. While attending my first live boot camp to learn the ropes, I had a dream where I could visualize my brain waves and tease apart the complex signal into individual components. I saw a kind of language emerge—one I couldn’t speak, but I intuitively knew was there. Imagine the individual brain wave frequencies as an alphabet forming words, with our subjective experiences as the decoded sentences. Just as our written and spoken language has syntax (the structure and pattern of the language) and semantics (the meaning of the sentence), so too does thought have its measurable patterns and its felt experiences.

This notion that reality has two aspects isn’t new. Philosophers like Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant proposed variations of dual-aspect monism, where mind and body are two attributes of a single substance. Picture reality as a coin: the physical world we observe is one side of the coin, and mind or consciousness is the other. Though they appear distinct, they are inseparable aspects of the same coin, of reality itself. The mental side of the coin is expressed in the syntax of thoughts, while the physical side is experienced as the semantics of reality.

We might think of our physical world as a vast, multiplayer virtual reality game. Each of us is both a player and a contributing part of the game world, simultaneously experiencing and co-authoring the reality we inhabit. The reason we perceive our physical world as objective and solid is that we’re all participating in creating it.

This perspective suggests that reality itself might be fundamentally linguistic in nature. While we often think of language as a human invention, what if there is a “natural language” intrinsic to reality? Could that language be anything other than mathematics itself? What other language could possibly be suitable?

Understanding thought as a language, with measurable syntax and experienced semantics, offers a fresh perspective on consciousness. This approach might help us navigate the “hard” problems of consciousness, but it requires acknowledging the mind—or soul—as a thinker and experiencer of thoughts. Could this linguistic nature of reality be the key to unraveling the mystery of qualia and bridging the gap between objective reality and subjective experience?