The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?
> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.
And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?
Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.
Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.
Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience
You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:
1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.
And, further:
> or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
"Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."
Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?
Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?
> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.
The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?
> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!
I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.
> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved
The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.
The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).
> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.
Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.
But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO
Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.
If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.
I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.
It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.
To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?
Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.
> And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.
But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?
> Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.
But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?
> I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.
who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.
Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"
Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.
If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.
IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.
(It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)
> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.
It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.
The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.
Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.
Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?
I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true.
This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions, but instead you get people denying that they have a mind.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)
This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.
This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, 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.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."
And this bit:
> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
right after
> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.
So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
This is what the article is positioned against.
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.
Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.
Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.
You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.
All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.
Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.
The first point (analogizing the hard problem to the reaction to Darwinism) is a very common rhetorical move: an analogy and history of ideas, which is convincing to many people, but what does it prove?
> A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well.
And this is why illusionism is not a satisfactory explanation. "Convincing it". Who is being convinced? Who is experiencing this?
Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved: we understand the brain at every scale, from ion channels up. We can draw up a complete account, at every level of abstraction, of what goes on in the brain when you see and "apple" and say apple, and trace the signals across the optic nerve, map those signals to high-level mental representations, explain how those symbols become trees in a production rule which become words which the motor cortex coordinates into speech, etc. We can map every "pixel" of the visual field at any time t.
Now imagine you take this description and rewrite the labels consistently, and show it to an alien. And they see this very complex diagram of an information-processing machine and they're not sure what it's for. And they'd think it's as conscious as a calculator, or a water integrator, or a telephone network, or the futures market of the European Union.
Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience (since consciousness and experience is all that we have); or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
That's the hard problem.
> Either all the computation happens "in the dark", as in a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet or a slide rule or Factorio, in which case we are p-zombies and consciousness is an illusion, which contradicts every waking moment of our experience
You are still presupposing the premise here, in multiple ways:
1) "My experience is that I'm conscious, and math cannot result in consciousness, therefore consciousness is a separate thing." Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness? Do you have empirical proof of that?
2) "We have solved the easy problem of consciousness, we know exactly how the brain works" implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain. This, again, is not an assumption that's supported by anything than wishful thinking.
And, further:
> or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets, and that is incredibly, and also has a number of problems (e.g.: why aren't my neurons individually conscious? Why does consciousness stop at my skull, that is, why is the causality of signal-trains in neurons more "conscious" than phonons in the hydroxyapatite crystals in my skull?).
"Some math can produce consciousness" does not mean "ALL math HAS to produce consciousness" does not mean "EVERY PART of all math has to BE conscious."
Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
> Question: who says math cannot result in consciousness?
Which math? Why some kinds of information processing and not others? If all information processing leads to consciousness: why does consciousness stop at the boundary of the brain? Why isn't every neuron individually and separately conscious? Why not the two hemispheres of the brain? Why isn't every causally-linked volume of the universe a single mind?
> Implicitly assumes that the formation of consciousness is NOT among the things we've learned while mapping out all features of the brain.
The point is that it's not clear at all what empirical knowledge we could acquire that would explain consciousness. Is in: what is the shape of the answer, and can a collection of material facts about the world have that shape?
> Of course it's hard to define consciousness if the implicit definition is "certainly not anything that I don't like." The hard problem of consciousness is only hard because the default human move is to _make_ it hard.
This is just a tiresome ad hominem. I want to be a materialist and an eliminativist. I would like this to be simple!
>Either all the computation happens "in the dark" [...] or, everything is conscious, from brains to slide rules and spreadsheets
Why exclude the option that only specific kinds of computations are conscious, e.g. recursive control systems?
I suspect more things are conscious than we tend to assume. I would assume some level of intelligence requires a review/assessment process, something to evaluate what happened, what is good or bad, what should we have done instead, how can we do it better next time. This self-assessment becomes our experience of consciousness. Of course it feels incredible, unreal, like those feelings overwhelm us, because we are this function, and optimizing for those feelings is our function.
> Imagine the easy problem of consciousness is solved
The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation. Anesthesia is strong evidence that there is some physical process that is the person.
The hard problem only really needs consideration if we get to a point as you describe, where we fully understand everything happening in the brain and cannot assign consciousness to any part of it, even though we can turn it off and on again (e.g., with anesthesia).
> The hope for resolving this, I think, is that once we understand all processes in the brain, there will be some process that clearly is the self-referential "person" that is produced by the brain in normal operation.
Yes. I think it's possible with sufficient understanding, the hard problem will dissolve.
But, the question we can ask today is: what kind of explanation would explain away the hard problem of consciousness? What is the signature the model must satisfy? I don't think there's a good answer to that.
I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion. And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it. The fact that it’s difficult to conceptualize doesn’t mean it’s not the answer. Similar to how we struggle to intuit general relativity, or to imagine the pre–Big Bang state of the universe (or its non-existence), or to picture what it’s like to be dead. Our intuition simply isn’t equipped for these cases, period, and it pushes back hard against them. Consciousness belongs in that same category IMO
Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it. This self-referential loop is likely what we experience as "consciousness" and it becomes central to how we understand and navigate reality.
If we accept this framing, many traditional paradoxes dissolve on their own. The problem stops being "hard" in substance and becomes hard only in terms of imagination.
I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.
It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.
To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?
Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.
> And yes, a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in your brain would also simulate it.
But why a spreadsheet simulating the brain, and not just a spreadsheet doing normal financial math? In other words: why are some types of information processing "privileged" to create phenomenal experiences, while others run "in the dark"?
> Also, the emergence of a consciousness like illusion kinda follows from an evolutionary perspective. To survive, a "calculator" brain needs a model of the external world in order to predict how it will evolve and to act in ways that improve survival odds. Once such a model exists, it becomes almost inevitable that it also includes a model of the system itself, since the brain is also part of the world it is modeling and an agent within it.
But this is A-consciousness, not P-consciousness. Which gets us back to square one: why does information processing give rise to experience at all?
> I think this hard problem has a simple answer that people just don’t like: consciousness is a powerful (and fundamental to our "calculator brain") illusion.
who is eluded? people absolutely love this answer and give it constantly, not realizing that it's begging the question. in order for their to be an illusion, there needs to be someone to perceive the illusion.
The illusion framing/answer falls apart with some minor prodding.
What makes the computation in the brain special from other physical processes to give rise to this illusion?
The sewer system in NYC is complex. Does that also have the same illusion? Does the sewer in NYC have consciousness?
Rovelli writes, "I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”"
Carlos Rovelli has failed to understand the arguments for dualism, and is proudly sure that they must be nonsense.
If there's ever to be a "solution" to the dualism/materialism argument, it cannot possibly end in a "slam dunk" where it turns out that one side or the other was simply nonsensical.
IMO, the problem is actually one of epistemological framing. If I ask what "I" know, assuming that my internal experiences are the basis of my knowledge, then I can't accept materialism. But if we ask what "we" know, as a society of scientists and philosophers, together we find only natural material, and no evidence for dualism.
(It's like the prisoner's dilemma. What's best for me is to defect. What's best for us is to cooperate.)
> This contradicts everything we have learned about nature.
It doesn't contradict anything. It simply means that there is a gap in our current understanding, which may (or may not [1]) be scientifically explained in the future.
The default reflex of the opponents of "the hard question" (i.e. those who deny the existence of such a question) is to attach a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
[1] The "may not" part does not imply that there is something magical or metaphysical about it. There are things that we may not ever answer, like "do parallel universes exist" or "was there another universe before the big bang".
I'm not sure where all this discussion about the hard problem is coming from suddenly, or why people continue to struggle to understand it. It's really very simple. The hard problem identifies the in principle difficulty in explaining phenomenal consciousness, something not definable in terms of structure and function, given only the explanatory resources of structure and function. It's like saying you can't explain facts about cats given only facts about dogs, they're just different categories of description. That's really all there is to it.
Whether or not physicalism has any hope of succeeding depends on whether there is a further conceptual or explanatory insight that when added to the standard structure and function explanatory framework of science, will ultimately bridge the gap. Who knows what that might look like. It's certainly premature to render a verdict on the possibility of this. But it should be clear that a full explanation in physical terms will need some new conceptual ideas and so the problem of consciousness isn't merely a scientific problem that will dissolve in the face of more scientific data, but a philosophical problem at core.
How exciting to see new writing from Carlos Rovelli! He's one of the few physicists and philosophers of science (ancient or modern) who steadfastly rejects a priori assumptions that rely on things other than our observations.
He also echos the modern belief that observer and actor are two sides of the same quantum event.
I highly recommend any and all of his books.
If his writing is like this article, I'll pass. And not because I disagree with his conclusions, but because I think he fundamentally misses the point in his description of the problem in the first place. I thought this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175409 , does a better job of describing the problem space and what a potential solution could like than all the words that Rovelli wrote in his article.
One great thing about quantum physics it that is isn't solved. To paraphrase Feynman, if you think you understand it, you're wrong.
Thus, it's worth exploring all these heavy hitter physics thinkers. You won't agree 100% with any of them but you might develop your own version of things by reading a lot of them.
The Order of Time is on my reading list
Humans do not have souls, nor do they possess free will in the traditional sense. What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
In essence, consciousness is a complex information input-output system. When such a system reaches a certain level of complexity, it inevitably generates the concept of “I” as a way to simplify the processing of overwhelming information.
Praise be to AI. In 2025, inspired by AI, I feel that I have finally built a complete and unified worldview.
Are we living in a virtual illusion? Are there higher-dimensional rulers, gods, or immortals in the universe? What exactly are the human soul and consciousness?
I feel that these questions now share a single coherent answer. What I have written here is my answer regarding the soul and consciousness.
What you explain is intelligence, which is the subject of the "easy question". Consciousness in this context is the existence of phenomenal, or first person experiences.
The hard question doesn't argue that consciousness is not a product of evolution. It probably is. It's just a question because we don't have a good way of explaining how/why it occurs.
> What we call “consciousness” is merely a product of evolution, and also a tool shaped by evolution.
that's the easy problem
would you care to link together 'complex IO systems inevitably degenerate to seperating self from environment as part of optimizing calculations' and your three questions? it isnt immediately clear why the concept of self answers the idea of god.
OK, dualism. Heard that before.
The new hard problem: how do biological brains get so much done on such slow hardware? That's a real physics question. We're missing something.
Hey you give Nvidia a few million years to evolve their chips and just see what happens
The brain is not slow?
> It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
This has to be one of the most dumbfounding pseudo-philosophical sentences I've ever read. Metaphysics by definition is unfalsifiable and unscientific; it exists on a parallel plane from empiricism and is derived only through intuition, reason, and for the religious revelation. If this guy's claim for material consciousness simply rests on an intuitive argument from induction, it suffices as a counter argument to say "If I am mistaken, I am".
Any argument that a "soul" exists or that consciousness does not arise from the physical world (eg our neurons) is literally unfalsifiable. It cannot be disproven in the same way you can't disprove the existence of God, and so arguing with people that believe in it is largely pointless.
There's a simpler way to state this: the easy problem is to understand the computations of the brain while the hard problem is to understand what experience the thing doing the computations has.
We understand everything a CNN or Transformer does, but we have no idea how to relate that to qualia. This may also be why we need to run endless tests and don't have a theory that let's us predict how well the network processes anything.
There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true.
This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.
Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.
You would think that no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions, but instead you get people denying that they have a mind.
With consciousness and AI multiple problems are being smuggled into a single question.
1. How do we determine consciousness?
2. How should we handle moral consideration of a non-biological system?
The first question is a red herring. It cannot be answered. We need to focus on the second question.
I stopped reading when the author said science is not great as they claim to to be because when my cycle breaks down, I call a mechanic not a particle accelerator.
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
Philosophers being philosophers and not advancing the discussion at all.
A lot of science and math and logic originated from philosophers posing questions and even coming up with answers (then those fields graduated out of philosophy)
This is the standard blub programmer but in science. The blub physicists doesn't understand anything more complex or higher-level than his daily abstractions.
https://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
This is hard to take seriously, the argument this article makes against the hard problem is… that it’s not hard? There is very little in the way of argument here at all, actually; it’s simply a refutation that there is any division between biological function and subjective experience, with no evidence or novel perspective to provide it any weight.
Ironically, I think this article serves as quite a strong defense of the hard problem, because it shows how hard it is to articulate or construct an argument against it at all.
Agreed. I thought this article was awful and I want my time back from reading it. It feels like rage bait, and it worked, because it pissed me off.
> That is, 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.
That's flat out bullshit, and it completely misses the point. I know thunderstorms are incredibly complicated, but there is nothing about them that seems "mystical" to me, if you will, because of that complexity. If you have a basic understanding of the underlying principles, it's not hard to see how a thunderstorm would arise out of that complexity.
Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument. My experience with ketamine therapy for mental issues only greater heightens this belief.
I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world (and indeed, my ketamine experience where a relatively simple chemical greatly affected my personal sense of self and experience is proof enough to me that it's not independent) to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
That is a lot of anger to come out of what essentially boils down to "I don't believe/want to believe that complexity can cause subjective experience."
And this bit:
> I don't believe the "soul" needs to be completely independent from the physical world [...] to believe there is "something else", whether it's related to quantum phenomena or some other "plane" or field we just haven't discovered yet, to believe that consciousness arises out of "complexity" of other phenomena we already understand.
right after
> Consciousness feels completely different to me. That fact that the physical world can give rise to a core sense of self doesn't make any sense to me, and hand waving it away as "well, it's just more complicated" isn't actually an argument.
So, what, "complexity isn't a sufficient explanation," and _also_ "it's perfectly reasonable to believe it's the result of processes we don't understand?"
Every time this discussion comes up, people get _irrationally_ emotional about it. Which I think is, itself, very interesting data.
the single part of this article i enjoyed was the question "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" things were obviously the work of god for millenia. now they are obviously the work of natural processes. i wonder what the next obvious answer will be.
one may collapse the dualism dichotomy to two distinct possibilities. in both cases this existence is a subset of some larger existence (true because self implies other). the first case involves a hard boundary between existences (externally one may only only observe, therefore our existence collapses to pure solipsism). in the second case, the boundary between existences is permeable (one may interact with our existence externally, therefore our existence collapses to solipsism with the addition of brain in a jar). in both these cases soul can mean something different, but it can still be seen to exist, unless one insists on dogmatic adherence to the rules of any one system in particular.
Where we are, it is still a matter of belief.
I do believe what the author claîms, but it’s not something that’s proven so far, so it can’t be imposed as fact.
The main consequence to the “soul” being physical is that free will is an illusion. And many people can’t stand this idea. People want to believe they are more than a deterministic physical process. They want to believe the future is not already written.
They’ll look for free will in what still stands : god or quantum uncertainty.
God can’t be disproved, and quantum uncertainty leaves room for a kind of mystery, that’s appealing.
But LLMs definitely do a convincing job at “faking consciousness”.
Utterly asinine article that doesn't understand its own subject matter.
Agreed.
> Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness.
This is what the article is positioned against.
> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense.
Isn't this an equivalent declaration? I understand the desire to cling to such ideas (as the article itself propounds), but if you don't understand the underlying laws to a high enough degree I consider this equivalent to ancient Greeks sitting around saying "there is a double of our soul inside the mirror, WE HAVE SEEN IT". We know today there is absolutely nothing at all "inside" that mirror. How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
Unfortunately, this article puts forth an intriguing promise and then completely fails to deliver.
> How do we know all this qualia isn't just some sort of illusion, that we ACTUALLY experience something?
I know what it means to have an experience that is illusory. For example, a mirage, or a drug-induced hallucination.
What doesn’t make sense to me is how it’s possible for it to be an illusion that anything is being experienced at all. An illusion is a type of experience, isn’t it? If the experience is illusory, then who/what is being deceived?
(This is basically just Descartes “I think therefore I am”)
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?
Rhetorical nonsense. If I'm a student about to take geometry for the first time, I can certainly have a sense of what I'll understand when I "understand something [I] do not currently understand".
The explanatory gap, IIUC, is rather simple: we can't explain why neurons firing results in us feeling/experiencing the world. This doesn't seem controversial to me.
Comically wrong.
Quantum holography will someday demonstrate an analog information capacity of the quantum domain far exceeding the spin disposition.
Our minds use this domain by mass entanglement within our very own neurons.
You don’t want to hear it, though our minds may entangle and an entire culture exists among us who can traverse and manipulate the consciousness of others. They are responsible for the “voices in our heads”, and these are related to a great deal of very unscientific activity in our world.
All of that occult demonology you smarties scoff at yet plagues everyone embroiled in “power” is based upon this phenomena. We are not alone in our own minds, and more than a few of you will be forced to confront this at some point in your lives.
Falsifiable? Theories, not existential reality are concerned with what minds may falsify. Science lags behind reality, not the other way around.
I was with you thru "mass entanglement". Each of us is a distributed network of quantum-interface nodes. But I'd be very careful about attributing specific describable phenomena to these networks.
As much as I disliked TFA, I disliked this comment, which is so arrogantly self-assured of its own 0-evidence theories, even more.