Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

by Carlo Rovelli

The mental world has different aspects—meaning, intentionality, values, objectives, ends, emotions, aesthetic and moral senses, mathematical intuition, perception, creativity, consciousness

the “hard problem” is not to understand how cerebral activities work; it is to understand how these activities are accompanied by corresponding subjective feelings as they happen.

But there is no “outside” to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist.128

Ideas on the nature of the mind are often limited to just three alternatives: dualism, according to which the reality of the mind is completely different from that of inanimate things; idealism, according to which material reality only exists in the mind; and naive materialism, according to which all mental phenomena are reducible to the movement of matter.

dualism,

idealism,

naive materialism,

think that when we wonder about the relationship between the “I” and “matter,” we are using two concepts that are both confused and misleading, and this is the origin of the confusion surrounding the questions about the nature of consciousness.

ask what consciousness

The relational perspective distances us from subject/object and matter/spirit dualisms, and from the apparent irreducibility of the reality/thought or brain/consciousness dualism.

Objections to the possibility of understanding our mental life in terms of known natural laws, on closer inspection, come down to a generic repetition of “It seems implausible to me,” based on intuitions without supporting arguments.*131 Unless it is the sad hope of being constituted by some vaporous supernatural substance that remains alive after death: a prospect that, apart from being utterly implausible, strikes me as ghastly.

Many, if not most, of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain; they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes.132

What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see.

The relevant input is not that which confirms what we already know, but that which contradicts our expectations.

We must abandon something that seemed most natural to us: the simple idea of a world made of things. We recognize it as an old prejudice, an old vehicle that we no longer have any use for.