It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
是时候放弃意识辩论所带来的二元论了
There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ 根本不存在所谓的“意识难题”
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. 意识并非与物理世界分离——我们的“灵魂”与我们的身体以及世界上的任何其他现象本质相同。
Florian Meissner for Noema Magazine 作者：Florian Meissner（为《Noema》杂志撰稿）
Credits: Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist known for his work on quantum gravity, the foundation of quantum mechanics and the nature of space and time. 简介：卡洛·罗韦利（Carlo Rovelli）是一位理论物理学家，以其在量子引力、量子力学基础以及时空本质方面的研究而闻名。
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. 一场关于“意识”这一模糊概念的激烈辩论正在进行。它重现了一种老套的文化抵制模式：我们人类往往会对任何可能扰乱自我形象的事物感到恐惧。
Famously, Darwin’s realization that we have common ancestors with all living organisms on our planet met ferocious resistance. Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. 众所周知，达尔文意识到我们与地球上所有生物拥有共同祖先时，曾遭遇过猛烈的抵制。许多人因为想到自己与驴子拥有同一个家谱而感到困惑或受辱。
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. 现代文化史上点缀着类似的意识形态后卫战，旧的世界观在面对新知识时节节败退，试图挽救某些被珍视的概念。在当前针对进步思想的文化反弹中，今天关于意识的辩论反映了人类的一种恐惧：即我们与无生命物质属于同一个大家庭，并因此失去了我们珍视的、超验的灵魂。
During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul. The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter. 在中世纪，西方文明将人类描述为由两个截然不同的实体组成：身体和灵魂。身体是一堆会腐烂和死亡的相互关联的物质；而灵魂则属于一个独立于卑微物质之外的超验精神世界。
Angels were souls without a body and so were people after their material death. The soul, taken to be immortal and created by God, was understood as the repository of memories, emotions and our subjectivity. It could speak and fall in love. It was the agent of our agency; the subject of our freedom; the entity that bore responsibility, culpability, virtue and value; and deserved to be judged, saved or damned. 天使是没有身体的灵魂，人在物质死亡后也是如此。灵魂被认为是上帝创造的、不朽的，被理解为记忆、情感和主体性的容器。它能说话，能坠入爱河。它是我们行为的代理人；是我们自由的主体；是承担责任、罪责、美德和价值的实体；并理应受到审判、救赎或惩罚。
The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves and by the long, slow effort to update them with our new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries. 当前的意识辩论受到我们根深蒂固的传统自我观念的影响，也受到过去三个世纪以来我们努力用新的现实认知来更新这些观念的漫长过程的影响。
Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. 尽管有些人傲慢地声称科学可以“解释一切”，但大多数现象，从雷暴到蛋白质折叠，都超出了我们的完全理解。我们仍然无法治愈流感，也无法准确预测两周后的天气。我们并不了解宇宙的基本物理定律。即使在我们确信自己了解基本的自然规律时，我们也仍然无法解释它们的含义。
I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist. The functioning of our own body and brain is among the phenomena we understand the least and are curious about the most. 我确信我的自行车忠实地遵循着粒子物理定律，但当它坏掉时，这些定律毫无用处。要修理它，我得找修理工，而不是粒子物理学家。我们自身身体和大脑的运作，是我们理解最少却又最好奇的现象之一。
This is the proper intellectual space where the “problem of consciousness” is located. That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon. 这正是“意识问题”所处的正确知识领域。也就是说，意识之所以难以理解，原因与雷暴难以理解完全相同：并不是因为我们有证据表明它不是一种自然现象，而是因为它是一种非常复杂的自然现象。
Updating the understanding of a phenomenon is not to deny it. Sunsets were understood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the descent of the sun in its daily motion over the Earth. Today, we understand them as a result of the Earth’s rotation, which turns us toward its shady side, where the sun gradually becomes no longer visible. 更新对某种现象的理解并不等于否定它。在古代和中世纪，日落被理解为太阳在地球上空每日运动时的下沉。今天，我们将其理解为地球自转的结果，地球将我们转向背阴面，太阳便逐渐变得不可见。
Such an update in understanding does not make sunsets illusory or unreal. Similarly, our soul won’t become illusory or unreal if we get a better sense of how our brain functions. We can still call our soul our “soul,” even if we understand ourselves better. I call it so, because this notion — the soul — is dear to my soul. 这种理解上的更新并不会让日落变得虚幻或不真实。同样，如果我们能更好地理解大脑的运作方式，我们的灵魂也不会变得虚幻或不真实。即使我们更了解自己，我们仍然可以称我们的灵魂为“灵魂”。我这样称呼它，是因为这个概念——灵魂——对我而言弥足珍贵。
The ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ “意识难题”
The consciousness debate is often formulated in terms used in an influential talk given by a young David Chalmers in Tucson in 1994. Chalmers, a philosopher, distinguished two separate “problems of consciousness.” 意识辩论通常采用年轻的大卫·查尔默斯（David Chalmers）在1994年图森市的一次有影响力的演讲中所使用的术语。哲学家查尔默斯区分了两个独立的“意识问题”。
The first is the very hard problem described above: understanding the processes in the brain that give rise to the many aspects of our visible behavior and our inner behavior that we can report about. Chalmers christened this hard problem as the “easy” problem of consciousness. 第一个就是上述提到的非常困难的问题：理解大脑中产生我们可见行为以及我们能够报告的内在行为的诸多方面的过程。查尔默斯将这个难题命名为意识的“简单”问题。
Then he declared that there is another distinct problem — why the brain’s behavior is accompanied by experience at all — which he christened the “hard” problem of consciousness. Today, this so-called “hard problem” is mentioned in all debates on consciousness. According to many, it unveils the very limits of current scientific understanding. 随后他宣称存在另一个截然不同的问题——为什么大脑的行为会伴随着体验——他将其命名为意识的“难题”。今天，这个所谓的“难题”在所有关于意识的辩论中都会被提及。在许多人看来，它揭示了当前科学认知的极限。
Chalmers claimed that even after hypothetically accounting for our entire behavior, and for all our reports about our inner life, there would still be an “explanatory gap” between brain processes and experience. 查尔默斯声称，即使假设我们已经解释了我们的全部行为，以及我们关于内心生活的所有报告，在大脑过程和体验之间仍然会存在一个“解释鸿沟”。
“In the Renaissance, it was hard to accept that heaven and Earth are of the same nature; after Darwin, it was hard to accept that animals and humans are cousins; after recent advances in biology, it is hard to accept that living beings and inanimate matter are of the same nature.” “在文艺复兴时期，人们很难接受天与地本质相同；达尔文之后，人们很难接受动物与人类是表亲；在生物学取得最新进展后，人们很难接受生物与无生命物质本质相同。”
The idea of this supposed “explanatory gap” reincarnates in a number of related forms: explaining “qualia,” the hypothetical elementary bits of experience; explaining “subjectivity,” the very fact that some entity is capable of having experience at all; or explaining, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously put it, “what is it like” to be the subject of a certain experience. 这种所谓的“解释鸿沟”的概念以多种相关形式转世：解释“感质”（qualia，即体验的基本假设单位）；解释“主体性”（即某些实体能够拥有体验这一事实）；或者解释哲学家托马斯·内格尔（Thomas Nagel）那句名言——成为某种体验的主体是“什么感觉”。
I fail to make sense of the claim that there is such an “explanatory gap.” It regards what we would understand if we were to understand something that we currently do not understand. Forgive the muddled question, but: How can we know now what we would understand if we were to understand something we do not currently understand? 我无法理解关于存在这种“解释鸿沟”的说法。它涉及的是如果我们理解了目前尚不理解的事物，我们会理解什么。请原谅我这个问题有些混乱，但：如果我们现在还不理解某件事，我们怎么可能知道一旦理解了它，我们会理解什么呢？
But this curious claim has been enthusiastically embraced by crowds of thinkers, commentators and writers across many fields and worldviews, who… 但这一奇特的说法却受到了跨越许多领域和世界观的众多思想家、评论家和作家的热烈追捧，他们……