The title may be needlessly aggressive. I think Rovelli could have framed this better by acknowledging there is a hard problem and then arguing that we have a better chance of resolving that problem by seeking a better understanding of conciousness as a physical process before drawing metaphysical lines in the sand. Or as Rovelli memorably puts it: "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" His point is that science is inextricable from subjective experience and subjective experience is inextricable from the physical world - a point made over 100 years ago by William James.
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".
> 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. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.
> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious
Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.
(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).
The title may be needlessly aggressive. I think Rovelli could have framed this better by acknowledging there is a hard problem and then arguing that we have a better chance of resolving that problem by seeking a better understanding of conciousness as a physical process before drawing metaphysical lines in the sand. Or as Rovelli memorably puts it: "How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand?" His point is that science is inextricable from subjective experience and subjective experience is inextricable from the physical world - a point made over 100 years ago by William James.
> I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.”
This is essentially saying "I don't understand therefore you are wrong".
> 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. Why should we have to explain why “red” looks red?
We did in fact need this to get AI to recognise cats.
If we wish to actually know if some AI is or is not conscious, and not simply re-hashing conversations ancient Greeks will probably have had as animism faded from their culture and they stopped believing in dryads and anima loci, then it needs to be testable *by something outside the intelligence being tested for conscious*.
> Scientific knowledge is ultimately first-personal. The world is real, but any account of it can exist only from within it. Any knowledge is perspectival. Subjectivity is not mysterious
Mysteriousness isn't the problem with subjectivity, lack of repeatability is. This is why we make instruments to measure things: my "about the size of a cat" is subjective and likely different from yours, while my "31.4 cm" is only going to differ from yours if one of us is surprisingly bad at using a ruler; my "pleasantly warm" may or may not be yours, but my "21.3 C" will only differ from yours if one of our thermometers has broken.
The "hard problem of consciousness" is that we not only don't have a device to measure consciousness, but even worse than that we don't even know what its equivalent of a ruler or thermometer would do.
(At least for this meaning of consciousness; there's at least 40, we can at least test for the presence or absence of the meaning that e.g. anesthesiologists care about, but that's not the hard problem).