Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

by Carlo Rovelli

Who is the “I” that has the sensation of feeling, if not the integrated set of our mental processes? We have an intuition of unity when we think about ourselves, but this is justified by the integration of our body and by the ways our mental processes work, of which the part we call conscious does one thing at a time. The first term of the problem, the “I,” is the residue of a metaphysical error: the result of the common mistake of mistaking a process for an entity. (Mach is categorical: “Das Ego ist unrettbar”: the “I” cannot be saved. Bogdanov is said to have put it in political terms: “The individual is a bourgeois fetish.”130) To ask what consciousness is, after having unraveled the neural processes, is like asking what a storm is after having understood its physics: it is a question that makes no sense. To add in a “possessor” of sensations is like adding Jove to the phenomenon of the thunderstorm. It is like saying, after having understood the physics of the storm, that there still remains, as Chalmers would put it, the “hard question” of connecting it with the anger of Jove.