In this paper I discuss three problems concerning consciousness. The first two problems have been dubbed ”The Hard Problem” and 
”The Harder Problem”. The third problem has received less attention and I will call it ”The Hardest Problem”. The Hard Problem 
is a metaphysical, and explanatory problem  concerning the nature of conscious states. The Harder Problem is epistemological. 
The problem is that if physicalism is true then all facts supervene on physical facts including facts about consciousness and so it is 
natural to expect that, given enough physical information, I can know whether another being is conscious. But it seems that I cannot 
know this. The Hardest Problem is a problem about reference. Both the Hard and the Harder Problems presuppose the common sense 
view that our subjective concepts refer determinately - modulo vagueness - to real, objective properties that can be instantiated in minds 
other than my own. It follows that there will be a matter of fact - even if I can never find it out - about whether a phenomenal concept of 
mine applies to another creature. The Hardest Problem is the problem of explaining how, given physicalism, this could be so. Together the 
three problems present, I suggest, a particularly difficult challenge to those philosophers who are, like me, both physicalists and phenomenal 
realists, and agree with dualists that there is an explanatory gap involving phenomenal consciousness.  My aim is to spell out the relations 
among them and then to explore how they appear from the perspective of an approach that strikes me as quite promising in so far as the first 
two problems are concerned. The approach I have in mind attempts to explain the various special and puzzling features of phenomenal 
consciousness in terms of what Stoljar has recently called ’the phenomenal concept strategy’. This approach can go quite far in handling the 
first two problems but, as we will see, runs into serious difficulties with the Hardest Problem.