Carlo Rovelli’s View of Consciousness Swallows Itself
What we are seeing here is not the
triumph of a new scientific insight,
but an inversion of the conditions
that make science possible
Carlo Rovelli: There Is No Outside, Except When I Need It
by John D. Wise, PhD
Carlo Rovelli, as close as one gets to a Rock Star in today’s physics, wants to reassure us that there is no “hard problem of consciousness.”
[For a primer on the hard problem of consciousness, watch this 12-minute interview with philosopher David Chalmers by Robert Lawrence Kuhn on YouTube.]
There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’: Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world (Carlo Rovelli, Noema, 7 May 2026)
The misperception, he argues, is an illusion created by a mistaken view of reality, a perceived explanatory gap between material reality and the perceiving subject. Rovelli is clear:
I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
The real reason anyone holds to the idea of an explanatory gap, Rovelli asserts throughout the paper, is hidebound regressive thinking:
A fierce debate is raging around the slippery notion of consciousness. It retraces a trotted pattern of cultural resistance: We humans are often scared by anything that may disturb our image of ourselves…. The cultural history of modernity is dotted by similar ideological rearguard battles, wherein old worldviews fight in retreat against novel knowledge to save some concept held dear. Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls. (emphases mine)
Let us see, then, whether sense can be made where Rovelli ‘fails to make it.’[1]
Carlo Rovelli is best known for his contributions to Loop Quantum Gravity and his theory of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM), which asserts that fundamental reality is cashed out in terms of relations, no substances. What follows, then, should not surprise us:
The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival.
At first this statement appears both modest and grounded in good science. We are part of the world, not observers standing outside it. Our knowledge is embodied, partial, and situated. These are things upon which we can all agree. But Rovelli’s argument depends, even if implicitly, on something rather less modest: a claim about all possible knowledge:
It is misleading to see science, as often naively portrayed, as a direct account of an absolute and objective world, observed and described from its outside.
In other words, there is no outside, no standpoint from which reality can be viewed as a whole – no vertical dimension. There is only a horizontal network of perspectives/relations within the world. This is what we should expect from the assumption of RQM as a metaphysics rather than as a scientific explanation.
But if we examine the logic rather than the rhetoric, this claim is not a local perspectival observation. It is what logicians call a “universal statement.”
And that is where the problem begins.
In a Klein bottle, the inside is continuous with the outside. But one can only evaluate it from a perspective outside the system.
The Unavoidable Vertical
To say that all knowledge is perspectival is not itself a perspectival statement. It is a universal statement; it is about ALL perspectives. It tells us how every possible viewpoint relates to reality as a whole.
But to do that, Rovelli must occupy a standpoint that is not merely one perspective among others. He must stand, however briefly, over against the entire field of perspectives in order to describe it.
First, Rovelli denies the vertical dimension. Then, he inhabits it. This is not a tension within his system. It is the condition of its impossibility.
“This Sweet World”
Consider the tone of Rovelli’s conclusion:
We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.
Three small words – this, world, and sweet – expose the structural problem of Rovelli’s horizontal ontology. Each term performs a progressively stronger operation: determination, totalization, and evaluation.
The word “this” is not descriptive; it is determinative and indexical. It singles out a discrete object: a this rather than a that. It presupposes that something can be identified as itself – stable enough to be picked out, referred to, and distinguished. It relies directly on the Law of Identity (A = A).
But Rovelli’s ontology must deny intrinsic identity. Objects, we are told, have no independent nature; they are nodes in a web of relations, defined entirely by interactions. If that were strictly the case, nothing could be a determinate this. There would be no stable referent to pick out, only an ongoing flux of relations without fixed identity. Yet his argument begins by doing exactly that: it identifies this world. Rovelli’s language presupposes a determinacy his ontology dissolves.
The word “world” performs an even more demanding operation, relying on the Law of Non-Contradiction Not-(A and not-A). It gathers an indefinite multiplicity into a single, bounded whole. To speak of “the world” is to treat reality as a totality, establishing a strict logical boundary between the system itself (the inside) and that which is not the system (the outside).
But Rovelli explicitly denies any external standpoint:
“Any account of it can exist only from within it.”
Qualia are sense-data or feelings our conscious minds have of objects having distinctive qualities, like red, sweet, or soft.
Here the tension becomes acute. A part, considered strictly as a part, does not have access to the whole as a whole. To articulate “the world” as such is already to step beyond any merely local perspective and to speak about the total field. The claim that there is no outside is necessarily made from a position that surveys the whole.
Rovelli’s denial requires the very standpoint it excludes.
Finally, “sweet” introduces the value dimension, an operation requiring the Law of Excluded Middle (A or not-A). This is not simple description; it is judgment. The world is not merely identified and totalized. It is assessed.
Yet in a strictly horizontal ontology, there is no basis for such evaluation. If all that exists is a network of processes, then no state of affairs stands higher or lower than another. A thunderstorm, a protein fold, and a human brain are, in principle, on the same ontological level, and none are privileged. To call the world sweet is to introduce a standard that is not reducible to the network itself. It is to measure the whole against a criterion that stands over against it.
The language of value, like the first two logical criteria,[2] reintroduces a vertical dimension forbidden by Rovelli’s ontology, but upon which he must lean for each claim he makes. He has to borrow the entire treasury of binary logic just to purchase a single line of poetry.
The Qualia of the Cat: A Self-Referential Collapse
This same structure reappears in Rovelli’s critique of David Chalmers. In dismissing the explanatory gap between the experiencing subject and that of which he is aware, he writes:
“Red,’ as a qualia, is the name of the process we generally undergo when we see or remember or think about the color red. We do not need to explain why it looks red for the same reason that we do not have to explain why the animal that we call ‘cat’ looks like a cat.
This comparison is telling, and fatal to Rovelli’s case. A physical process does not “look like” anything in itself. “Looking like” is a relation to an observer capable of recognizing, distinguishing, and synthesizing appearances.
A cat does not “look like” a cat to a stone. It looks like a cat to a subject who can differentiate cat from non-cat and unify perceptual data into a coherent object. Rovelli attempts to dissolve qualia into physical process, but his explanation depends on the very appearance it is meant to eliminate. He appeals to how things look in order to deny that “looking” and what it discovers require explanation.
He accuses Chalmers of “introducing dualism upfront” by assuming a metaphysical gap. But Rovelli has simply performed the inverse maneuver: he introduces monism upfront by assuming the observer away, only to rely on the observer’s qualitative judgment to write his own conclusion. By evaluating the world as “sweet,” Rovelli is experiencing a qualia that no horizontal network of physical interactions can generate.
The same pattern appears in his closing line. Just as “red” is reduced to a process while still being treated as an appearance, so the world is reduced to a horizontal network while still being experienced – and described – as sweet.
How’s that for an explanatory gap?
What Science “Convincingly Shows”
This structural blindness carries over into his treatment of knowledge and history. Rovelli repeatedly appeals to the authority of science to clear the board:
The hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.
But what does “shown” mean here? If all knowledge is perspectival, and scientific knowledge is “ultimately first-personal,” then scientific success is itself only one perspective among others. It cannot function as a universal, cross-perspectival arbiter of truth.
To wield it, as Rovelli does, as a decisive verdict against competing views is a fallacy of equivocation that allows him to reenact the very “trotted pattern” he ridicules: dismissing philosophical disagreement as fear, nostalgia, or an “ideological rearguard action,” rather than recognizing it as a legitimate structural challenge to his own metaphysical[3] commitments. He denies any standpoint outside the system, while quietly relying on a cross-perspectival authority to validate his system and rule entire classes of explanation out of court.
When Science Turns Inside Out
What we are seeing here is not the triumph of a new scientific insight, but an inversion of the conditions that make science possible. Science works because reality can correct our ideas, because the world stands over against us as something not reducible to our perspectives.
Rovelli’s framework removes that possibility.
In doing so, he does not solve the “hard problem” of consciousness. Instead, he dissolves the very distinction between problem and solution.
A fully horizontal world cannot sustain knowledge. It can only circulate interpretations in a continuous undifferentiated loop. Even to articulate his vision, Rovelli must stand above the world and speak about it as a whole.
That is the vertical he cannot escape, because it is the very condition that allows him to speak at all.
Footnotes
[1] I hope the double entendre here is not lost on the reader.
[2] An astute reader will notice that what is at issue here is thought itself, the very Laws of Logic. The question of this essay can fairly be framed as a battle for Reason, and by consequence Science itself, against the narrative logic science adopted in the early 19th Century.
[3] Metaphysical, not scientific, as professor Rovelli would prefer to paint it.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.