The Problem Of Consciousness Is Our Cognitive Limitation To Understand The Problem

Recently, the Berggruen Institutes’ Noema Magazine published a duo of articles on the ‘Hard Problem’ of Consciousness that are misleading, or misinformed, on a number of fronts. I would like to point out these problems, and show how a more veridical account of this understanding has developed over the last 158 years, and might better inform the reader. The issues with these articles, that I raise, are not limited to the problem of consciousness, but illustrate why we are unable to understand, or respect, each other, and I argue that this is a major factor in the multiple catastrophes we are now living through.

The matter of consciousness is our cognitive limitation to understand the problem. Many do not see a problem, for all is matter, they say. So the author, the physicist Carlo Rovelli, has decided to make the point clear: your soul is a material, not spiritual, aspect of your being, so there is no 'hard problem' of consciousness. He wants the word “soul” to carry this meaning, ridding the world of any divinity in the human being. He believes that this is a good thing. He argues that the current idea of the soul is wrong because it is described as a ‘transcendent’ nonmaterial aspect of our being — a description that even takes in the Buddhist idea of a non-personal ‘Buddha Nature,’ and that it is only our very human fear of losing our cherished idea of ourselves as something more than just matter, that keeps us from seeing the truth of the new understanding of reality that has developed over the last three centuries in science. He argues that the understanding he is presenting erases the ‘so-called’ hard problem of consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is not a problem at all. And to prove it, he misrepresents what the ‘so-called’ problem is.