Helgoland by Rovelli, Erica (story read aloud txt) 📕

to physics: it requires a growth in complexity (Bogdanov would say of “organization”), but always in a world that is made up of perspectives, already from the most elementary level.

I 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.

Who is the “I” that has the sensation of feeling, if not the integrated set of our mental processes? We have an intuition of unity when we think about ourselves, but this is justified by the integration of our body and by the ways our mental processes work, of which the part we call conscious does one thing at a time. The first term of the problem, the “I,” is the residue of a metaphysical error: the result of the common mistake of mistaking a process for an entity. (Mach is categorical: “Das Ego ist unrettbar”: the “I” cannot be saved. Bogdanov is said to have put it in political terms: “The individual is a bourgeois fetish.”130) To ask what consciousness is, after having unraveled the neural processes, is like asking what a storm is after having understood its physics: it is a question that makes no sense. To add in a “possessor” of sensations is like adding Jove to the phenomenon of the thunderstorm. It is like saying, after having understood the physics of the storm, that there still remains, as Chalmers would put it, the “hard question” of connecting it with the anger of Jove.

It is true that we have the “intuition” of an independent entity that is the “I.” But we also once had the “intuition” that behind a storm there was Jove. And that the Earth was flat. It is not through uncritical “intuitions” that we construct an effective comprehension of reality. Introspection is the worst instrument of inquiry if we are interested in the nature of mind: it is tantamount to looking for our own prejudices and wallowing in them.

Even worse is the second term of the question, “matter.” It is, as well, the residue of an incorrect metaphysics based on too naive a conception of matter as a universal substance defined only by mass and motion. This is erroneous metaphysics because it is contradicted by quantum physics.

If we think in terms of processes, events, in terms of relative properties, of a world of relations, the hiatus between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is much less dramatic. It becomes possible to see both as natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions.

Our knowledge of the world is articulated in various sciences, more or less connected with each other. Among the components of our knowledge, physics plays a role that quanta have partly emptied and partly enriched. On the one hand, the claim of eighteenth-century mechanism to have clarified the fundamental substance that is the basis of everything has vanished. On the other hand, the growth in our understanding of the grammar of the real has been perhaps disconcerting, but it is richer and more subtle than the previous synthesis, and it allows us to think of the world in a more effective way.

At the physical level, the world can be seen as a web of reciprocal information. In the realm of the Darwinian mechanisms, this information becomes significant, it makes sense to us. Ὁ κόσμος άλλοίωσις, ὁ βίος ὑπόληψις. The cosmos is change, life is discourse—as the fragment 115 by Democritus has it. The cosmos is interaction; life organizes relative information. We are a delicate and complex embroidery in the web of relations of which, as far as we currently understand it, reality is constituted.

If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.

In these layers we have been able to recognize regularities and have gathered information relevant to ourselves that has enabled us to create a picture of each layer and to think about it with a certain coherence. Each one is an approximation. Reality is not divided into levels. The levels into which we break it down, the objects into which it appears to be divided, are the ways in which nature relates to us, in dynamical configurations of physical events in our brain that we call “concepts.” The separation of reality into levels is relative to our way of being in interaction with it.

Fundamental physics is no exception. Nature follows its simple rules, but the complexity of things often renders the general laws irrelevant to us. Knowing that my girlfriend obeys Maxwell’s equations will not help me to make her happy. When learning how a motor functions, it is best to ignore the nuclear forces between its elementary particles. There is an autonomy and independence of levels of understanding of the world that justifies the autonomy of the different areas of knowledge. In this sense, elementary physics is much less useful than physicists would like to think.

But these are not real fractures. The basics of chemistry are understandable in terms of physics, the basics of biochemistry in terms of chemistry, the basics of biology in terms of biochemistry, and so on. We understand some of these articulations well; others