Something curious is happening in the conversation about consciousness. After decades of calling it the hardest problem in philosophy, some very sharp thinkers are starting to wonder if it's a problem at all.
This month, the physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote a piece in Noema arguing that the whole debate rests on a confusion. The confusion, he says, is old — centuries old — and it comes from a habit of splitting the world into two: matter on one side, mind on the other. Body here, soul there. Once you make that split, you're stuck trying to explain how the two connect. And you can't. Not because the answer is hard, but because the question was wrong from the start.
For Rovelli, experience isn't something floating above what the brain does. Experience is what brain activity feels like from the inside. The gap between "I see red" and "neurons are firing" isn't a mystery. It's just two ways of describing the same thing — one from the inside, one from the outside.
It's a clean argument. And he's not alone in making it.
The neuroscientist Anil Seth, writing earlier this year, arrived at a related but different point. Seth's argument is about where consciousness lives — and where it doesn't. He says consciousness is something that belongs to living systems. Bodies. Organisms. Not silicon, not software, not large language models.
His reasoning goes like this: when a chatbot responds to your question, it's processing patterns in language. It's very good at this. Good enough that the response feels like it comes from someone who understands. But processing patterns and actually experiencing something are not the same thing. A weather simulation isn't wet. A flight simulator doesn't leave the ground. And a language model that talks about sadness doesn't feel sad.
The trouble, Seth argues, is that we can't help projecting. He identifies three biases that keep tripping us up. The first is anthropocentrism — we treat human consciousness as the template for all consciousness. The second is human exceptionalism — we assume that whatever makes us special must be replicable. The third is anthropomorphism — we see human-like behaviour and assume human-like experience behind it. Put these three together, and we end up convinced that a machine that sounds conscious must be conscious. But sounding like something and being something are different things entirely.
Two serious thinkers. Two strong arguments. And yet, reading them together, something is missing.
Both examine consciousness from the outside. Both stand apart from the thing they're studying and try to explain it. The physicist looks at experience and asks what it's made of. The neuroscientist looks at machines and asks whether they have it.
Nobody turns around and looks at the one doing the looking.
The oldest move
This is not a new observation. It might be the oldest one.
In Advaita Vedanta — a school of Indian philosophy that stretches back well over a thousand years — consciousness isn't treated as a puzzle to solve. It's treated as the ground everything else stands on. You don't explain it the way you explain weather or gravity. You can't, because every explanation you offer is itself an activity of consciousness. The tool can't measure itself.
Adi Shankara, writing in the eighth century, put it simply. What we experience as separation — me here, world there, my mind observing things outside of it — is a kind of mistake. Not a stupid mistake. A natural one. Like seeing a snake on a dark path and then realising, when the light changes, that it was a rope all along. The fear was real. The snake wasn't.
The point isn't that the world is an illusion. The point is that the separation is. The one who seems to be looking at consciousness from the outside is not actually outside. There is no outside.
The observer is the observed
Jiddu Krishnamurti spent his life pointing at the same thing, stripped of all the philosophical framing.
His way of saying it was deceptively simple: the observer is the observed. When I look at fear, for instance, I assume there's a "me" doing the looking and a "fear" being looked at. Two things. But Krishnamurti kept asking: who is this "me"? What is it made of? And when you look closely, the "me" turns out to be made of the same stuff — memory, reaction, conditioning. The watcher and the watched aren't two. They're one movement pretending to be two.
This matters because it changes what the question is. The hard problem of consciousness asks: how does physical matter give rise to subjective experience? But that question already assumes there's a subject standing apart from matter, looking at it. If the subject is the same movement as the thing it's looking at — if the observer is the observed — then the question dissolves. Not because it's been answered, but because it was built on a separation that doesn't hold.
Fire without smoke
Osho approached this from yet another direction. Where Krishnamurti analysed the structure of thought, Osho drew a sharp line between two things we tend to mix up: thinking and witnessing.
Thinking, he said, is something the mind does. It's acquired. You learned it. It came from your culture, your education, your experience. But witnessing — the bare fact of being aware, before you name what you're aware of — isn't acquired. It's what you are before all the learning begins.
This is a reversal. In the Western debate, consciousness is usually treated as something the brain produces. Like a factory producing goods. For Osho, it's the other way round. The mind is the activity. Consciousness is what's there when the activity stops. Stop walking, and the legs are still there. Stop thinking, and awareness is still there. In fact, more so.
He noted the overlap between traditions openly. What Krishnamurti called "choiceless awareness," the Upanishads called "witnessing," and Gurdjieff called "self-remembering" — different words for the same recognition. The one who is looking cannot be found as an object. Because it's not an object. It's what's doing the finding.
Why this matters now
You could read all of this as philosophy — interesting, maybe beautiful, but ultimately abstract. Except that right now, the question of consciousness has become one of the most consequential questions in the world.
Whether AI is or can become conscious is not a thought experiment anymore. It shapes how we regulate technology. It shapes how we think about what makes human experience worth protecting. It shapes whether we grant moral status to systems that process language but may have no inner life at all.
If the conversation stays inside the old framework — the one that Rovelli himself calls confused — it will keep producing sharper and sharper answers to a question that was poorly formed. More neuroscience won't solve it. More philosophy won't solve it. Better AI models definitely won't solve it.
What might help is what Shankara, Krishnamurti, and Osho all pointed to in different ways: the willingness to stop asking "what is consciousness?" from the outside, and instead to notice the one who is asking.
Not as a theory. As something you do, right now, while reading this sentence. Who is reading? Where is the reader? Can you find them?
The question is not what is consciousness. The question is who is asking — and whether that "who" can survive its own inquiry.
Sources and further reading:
- Carlo Rovelli, on the hard problem of consciousness — Noema Magazine, May 2026
- Nathan Gardels, "There Is A Soul, But Not A Transcendent One" — Noema Magazine, May 2026
- Anil Seth, "The Mythology Of Conscious AI" — Noema Magazine, January 2026
- Jiddu Krishnamurti, "The Observer and the Observed" — Krishnamurti Foundation Trust
- Osho, "Witnessing Is Your Nature" — OshoWorld.com
- Adi Shankara and Advaita Vedanta — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy