It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

There's a hard problem in either case, I think.

If the mind is supported by or comes from the physical world, then the hard question is "why is there something it is like to be me"?

If the physical world is supported by or comes from the mind, then the hard question is "why is the product of my thoughts sometimes incredibly malleable and other times not at all?"

From a pragmatic perspective, there are certain events that behave the same whether the mind came first and is somehow restricted in certain capacities, or if the natural world came first and is imposing itself on the mind (through whatever supports it).

For instance, falling down stairs is going to hurt in either case. If the physical world exists independently, that happens because you either are or have a body which is also subject to its laws. If there's a mental monism, that happens because you can't shape all your thoughts, and those thoughts you can't shape act on some other part of you in a way that injures what you think of as your body.

I think these philosophical arguments boil down to answering the question "what is real?". Contemporary science is presented as an objective theory of reality, but our experiences form the actual starting point for everything that we can ever know about reality, so they ought to be considered real in some sense. The tension begins because, while a physical theory of reality will say that the signals in a brain are real signals, that does not imply the reality of any concepts that those signals may represent. If I imagine something, that does not make it real. But then the same can be argued for all experiences: there are real brain signals associated with them, but that does not imply the reality of those experiences. This lead to a gap in that the physical theory fails to imply, and thus fails to explain, the reality of experience. So, if I believe in the reality of my own experience, then I am left to ask "why is my experience real?", as that is not required or implied by the physical theory of reality.

It sounds like Rovelli's resolution is to acknowledge the centrality of subjective experiences to the formulation of scientific theories, and thus also to any theory of reality. Experiences are the starting point, with the rest being built up from them. Therefore, experiences should also be the first thing added into the bucket of things that one believes to be real. Meanwhile, any physical model of objective reality has a far more tenuous spot in that bucket. We may suspect it to be real through various deductions, but the further away we get from experiences, the more assumptions have to be made to get there. Anyway, I agree that there is no explanatory gap when reality is viewed in this manner. And this is a relatively palatable way to approach the question of reality (compared to, e.g., the mathematical universe hypothesis, which most find unacceptable). But as long as there is debate about what makes up reality and where experiences fit into that, the debate around the hard consciousness problem will continue, and I regard this problem to be of a different character (being far more philosophical) than, say, spiritualism or anti-Darwinism.

I was rejecting your definition of the hard problem as it contains an assertion that a physicalist wouldn't accept.

Yes, reduction would be one very viable strategy. It doesn't require precisely defining the phenomenon in order for me to just say that it reduces based on the fact that reduction has been a successful approach for everything else in cognition.

> There is an in principle barrier to a transparent structural description of phenomenal consciousness.

Yeah this is what I reject. Why do you say that this is in principle a barrier? You're discussing it as an explanatory gap, not in principle.

I feel like this is directly addressed in the article, right? I think you are coming from the same direction, but Rovelli goes a bit further and says "how can we affirm that there is gonna be a knowledge gap when we just aren't at that level yet?". How can you say that we won't be able to describe, explain and predict your exact internal mental state from a brain scan?

To draw a parallel with physics, about which we as a society (and me as an individual) know a lot more, we are gonna define mathematical objects and laws whose behavior maps well to certain subsystems of the brain that we ourselves have defined. Physics had it easy in this sense: it turned out to be remarkably simple to describe the universe to a great degree of precision. Still, we all recognize that the physics mapping we have to this day isn't perfect; and it's even possible that it will never be perfect. It may be fundamentally impossible to reduce some systems to simpler mathematical objects which we can reason about. It does seem to be generally possible, however, to find a reasonable approximation. This again is what I think Rovelli's point is about: science is the process of finding a good approximation which has predictive power. And what is there in the brain that's fundamentally so different and that we're never gonna be able to explain? Why does everyone keep insisting that consciousness is special?

I do agree that that only when (if) we do get the accurate mathematical description, then we're gonna be able to properly discuss the hard problem. But my hunch is that once we do have all the tools it will just dissipate from scientific discussion, similarly to how the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is slowly undergoing the same transition from "this is a fundamental problem" to "we were just asking an invalid question due to misunderstanding and old ways of thinking". Obviously I have no proof of this beyond intuition, but I more or less agree with every sentence of this article, and that shapes my intuition.