Rovelli: There is No Hard Problem of Consciousness

Today we look at Carlo Rovelli’s article, There Is No Hard Problem of Consciousness. Rovelli says that David Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness”, is rooted in our resistance to letting go of our ingrained notion of a separate soul and the attempt to describe a first person experience in a third person objective manner.

This is very much in line with Douglas Harding’s refutation of the so called “hard problem”. Harding also recognized that the third person experience is appearing in the first person experience. Harding described how other people appear to us in our first person experience and we appear in their first person experience, saying “your mind is my body, and my mind is your body”.

Both Rovelli and Harding view the hard problem as a misguided attempt to combine two incommensurate perspectives of the same world. I like the simplicity of that. It means there is no “problem” to solve, there is just different perspectives to enjoy.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit headlessdeepdive.substack.com