“Consciousness, I think, is a modern way for soul.”
Within Reason · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Rovelli says consciousness is nothing more than many small things interacting, and also that physics hasn't understood a clue about it. Just as chemistry and physics turned out to be compatible descriptions of the same world, he thinks talk of the mind is another valid description, not something to be reduced away.
Transcript
…because it's too complicated. Nobody would even dream of doing that. So we haven't reduced chemistry to physics. Chemistry keeps its entire autonomy as a good way of thinking about reality. We have just shown that the two are perfectly compatible. And when we can use both, they say the same thing.
Yeah. So, okay. So I understand that. I think I was thinking about...
I would think that, you know, it's the same when we talk about our mind, our consciousness. Consciousness, I think, is a modern way for soul.
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can understand that. I think.
We're just using a different language for describing what happened to us, what we do. And of course, we have, it's not like chemistry, physics. We have difficulty of joining the pieces. There's a lot of work to do. I hope it will be done. But there's nothing mysterious, I think, there.
I was thinking about the question you asked about, like, you know, when I sort of want to know what an electron is or something. And you say, well, what's the difference between the question of what it is versus what it does and the question of the chair? And I think I understand that practically…
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