Physicalists realized decades ago that even a complete understanding of our physical brains could not by itself explain how subjective experience arises—a conundrum called “the hard problem of consciousness”. The hard problem arises because physicalists assume that good explanations are always reductionist in form—that they account for a phenomenon in terms of its subcomponents. And because they are physicalists, they also assume that these subcomponents must themselves be physical entities (e.g., neurons or neurotransmitters). If, however, we transcend these two physicalist assumptions (i.e., by acknowledging the possibility of explaining consciousness purely in terms of abstract entities, such as the information being processed by the brain, rather than in terms of the brain’s physical subcomponents) then the hard problem of an explanatory gap between physical brains and abstract consciousnesses disappears.