The hard problem may be an epistemological and resolvable problem. If conscious experiences are ontologically reducible to particular brain states but have direct, nonrelational knowledge content that, for solely perspectival reasons, is epistemologically irreducible to an outside observer's indirect and relational knowledge of these brain states, there is no hard problem, no explanatory gap.

Everything about a conscious experience, including its irreducible knowledge content, is subsumed within the reality known to an outside observer as a brain state and everything about it – including why it is ‘like this’ and why it is ‘like anything’ – can be identified and explained in externally observed terms.

(The brain states should be unique in ways that will make the resulting accounts plausible and satisfactory.)

We need not explain how the brain states transform themselves into the conscious experiences. This does not happen, except through a shift in perspective – a particular conscious experience and brain state are simply the same physical thing known in irreconcilably different ways.

A full account of a given conscious experience and brain state consists of a full external observer’s account of the brain state mapped to our irreducible inner view of what the conscious experience is like when known directly and nonrelationally – additional, scientifically trivial, knowledge about the brain state in this perspective, but essential to a complete account.