Famously, the philosopher David Chalmers has said that “the hard problem” of consciousness is explaining how the brain’s biological processes produce an individual’s subjective experience.

In a recent Noema essay, Carlo Rovelli argues that this is not the hard problem it is said to be. For the Italian theoretical physicist, making such a metaphysical distinction is a legacy of Western philosophy’s long, religion-inflected history, which treats the soul and body as separate domains, even though they are in reality of the same substance.

As Rovelli puts it, “today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls.” At the heart of this discourse is a misreading of what scientific understanding is all about. For Rovelli, “scientific understanding is not extraneous to experience; it is entirely about experience.

“Empiricism, the grounding of knowledge in experience, is not alternative to science; it is a main component of science’s traditional conceptual ground. … It is misleading to see science, as often naively portrayed, as a direct account of an absolute and objective world, observed and described from its outside. If we think in this manner, we introduce dualism. No surprise, then, that we find dualism down the road: an irreducible gap between subject and object of knowledge. We have introduced it upfront.”

Here, Rovelli emphasizes the quantum outlook he has been so influential in expositing. 

“We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”

Where The Confusion Begins

It is here where confusion about “the hard problem” sets in:

“The source of the confusion about consciousness is the initial step: treating knowledge, consciousness and qualia as something to be derived from a scientific picture understood to be about something else,” writes Rovelli. These need not be “derived” from the scientific picture, because the scientific picture is a story about them. Experience is not over and above the processes that happen in the brain, as Chalmers assumes. Experience is the name we give to what happens in us when those phenomena happen in us. It is the name of those phenomena, not something else. The dualism between a first-person description of experience and a third-person (“scientific”) account of the same is a “normal perspectival difference.”

The Material Soul

What this means for Rovelli is, “any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality. There are hinges between a representation and where it is embodied, and this may be a singular point in a representation, but it is not a metaphysical gap. It is not an explanatory gap.”

As Rovelli sees it, the real “hard problem” is understanding more about the functioning of our brain and body.

“This is compatible with the notion that we do have a soul, but not a transcendent one, different in kind from the rest of nature. We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account.”

As Rovelli notes, in closing: “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.”