Physicist Carlo Rovelli claims that our experience of consciousness – of a “self” that is aware of itself along with the world around us — is not something separate from the natural world.
Unfortunately, the headline writers at Noēma, which published his essay, entitled his piece “There’s No Hard Problem of Consciousness.”
Of course there is, and Rovelli acknowledges it, though I can see how his editors made their mistake.
Rovelli’s main argument is that consciousness, like everything else we experience and observe in nature, is in nature. And, like everything in nature, it must operate according to rules of origin and operation. He writes:
…Consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
We just haven’t figured it out yet.
But he introduces his not-so-controversial opinion with a description of a centuries’ old debate between wisdom that is revealed through dictate or belief versus that which is discovered through repeatable and reliable experimentation. He hones in on a talk given by David Chalmers in 1994 in which the philosopher hypothesized that the problem of explaining the experience of consciousness resided in the realm of revelation and was therefore distinct from describing the physical mechanisms that produce it.
He called this “The Hard Problem” and, according to Rovelli, defined a limit, or “explanatory gap” that science couldn’t fill, writing:
The idea that we will never be able to understand consciousness upholds a worldview in which spirit and nature, subject and object, form distinct domains. Accepting that consciousness may not be separate from the physical world — that our beloved soul could be of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world — is too much for many.
But Chalmers never said that; he simply said that our current scientific understanding couldn’t explain it.
After establishing this inaccurate strawman, Rovelli goes on to argue something of the same thing: that consciousness could still be miraculous, wonderful, and even special while simultaneously being, as he explains, consistent with our fundamental physics.
He’s not saying that we will ever fully explain it, as there always seems to be another physical law at work underneath every discovery…or that we’ll ever recreate it, just as we may never be able to build a quark. So there’s no reason to expect it will emerge spontaneously from some additive compute model getting built right now by Anthropic or OpenAI, and it’s just foolish dithering to announce that appearing to have done it is the same thing as accomplishing the task.
No, Rovelli doesn’t deny that the problem of consciousness is hard; he simply states that the answer(s) — if answers can be found — must come from the universe in which we live and the science we use to comprehend it:
Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.
Explaining why the cosmos is infused with consciousness, and how we somehow get to perceive it, seems less like a problem to solve than an opportunity for discovery.
Rovelli’s essay deserved a better headline.