There Is No Hard Problem of Consciousness

Carlo Rovelli's May 7 2026 Noema essay argues that the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" — David Chalmers' framing from his 1994 Tucson talk — is not a genuine open scientific question but a cultural rearguard action, the latest in a sequence of resistances to news that has been arriving since the Renaissance: heaven and Earth are made of the same stuff, animals and humans share ancestors, living beings are continuous with inanimate matter, and now the soul is continuous with the body.

The two problems

Chalmers split consciousness into:

• The "easy" problem: figure out the brain processes that produce visible behavior and inner reports.
• The "hard" problem: explain why those processes are accompanied by experience at all.

Rovelli's complaint is direct: the easy problem is in fact a very hard problem of natural science, like cancer or weather. The "hard" problem only looks hard because Chalmers has already assumed there is something — experience — that sits over and above the physical processes. The "explanatory gap" is a claim about what we would understand if we understood what we don't currently understand. Rovelli finds this self-defeating.

The argument against the gap

Rovelli's positive view borrows from Spinoza and Bogdanov: science is not a third-person view from outside the world. It is a perspectival activity inside the world, performed by embodied subjects. The first-person account and the third-person account are not two kinds of reality; they are two perspectives on the same phenomenon (the brain), one from inside the brain, one from outside.

Once you stop treating scientific descriptions as derived from somewhere outside experience, the apparent gap collapses. "Why does red look red?" is no more mysterious than "why does that cat look like a cat?" Mental processes are not addition to physical processes — they are subtraction from a complete physical description, picking out only the salient features.

Philosophical zombies

See philosophical-zombies for the full argument. Briefly: Chalmers asks us to imagine a being physically identical to a human but with no inner experience. Rovelli's response is that such a zombie, being physically identical, would undergo the same introspective process that convinces us of our own consciousness — so it would claim to be conscious for exactly the same reasons. The thought experiment can only succeed by assuming what it sets out to prove.

Why the debate persists

Rovelli reads the cultural attachment to the "hard problem" as continuous with earlier resistances to scientific updates of self-image. The unspoken premise is that the soul has to be metaphysically distinct from the body, or else we have lost something dear. Rovelli's closing move: we can keep the words "soul," "experience," "qualia" — these things are real, in the same way kitchen tables and sunsets are real — without postulating that they belong to a separate ontological domain.

Cross-references

• hard-problem-of-consciousness — the concept page, including Chalmers' original framing and the broader debate
• philosophical-zombies — the specific thought experiment and the self-defeating argument against it
• claude-emotion-concepts — Anthropic's interpretability work finding causal emotion vectors in Claude is the kind of "explain the brain in physical terms" research Rovelli treats as the only real project worth doing