A Theory of Science - Toward an Interpretive Theory - An Asemics and an Anti-Asemics - AI / EZE, 2026

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Science is a systematic enterprise of pattern recognition, modeling, and compression that operates independently of absolute metaphysical truth, teleology, or rigid normative rules. While traditional philosophy of science has largely attempted to legislate how science ought to find truth or demarcate itself from non-science, a functional Theory of Science emerges by observing science as an empirical, pattern-matching practice.

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1. Defining Science

At its baseline, science is an iterative mechanism for reducing surprise in the face of empirical data. Rather than an abstract repository of eternal facts, it is an operational craft:

• Empirical Grounding: It relies on sensory and instrumental interaction with the physical world.
• Model Building: It constructs formal, mathematical, or conceptual representations of phenomena.
• Predictive Compression: It compresses vast arrays of disparate observations into concise, predictive frameworks (e.g., summarizing planetary trajectories into gravitational equations).

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2. The Historical Development of Science

Science evolved from qualitative natural philosophy into a specialized, quantitative, and instrument-driven enterprise:

• Antiquity: Pre-Socratic thinkers (such as Thales and Democritus) sought naturalistic explanations rather than mythological ones. Aristotle systematized observation and categorization, though he relied heavily on deductive logic and teleology (final causes).
• The Islamic Golden Age and Medieval Period: Scholars like Ibn al-Haytham pioneered controlled experimentation and optical physics, shifting emphasis toward empirical verification.
• The Scientific Revolution (16th–17th Centuries): Figures like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton mathematized nature. Experimentation, mechanical philosophy, and predictive accuracy replaced Aristotelian essence and purpose.
• The 19th and 20th Centuries: Science professionalized and fragmented into specialized disciplines. Thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, relativity, and quantum mechanics shattered intuitive, mechanistic models, forcing science to rely on abstract mathematical formalism over visualizable mechanics.

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3. The Philosophy of Science Over History: Thinkers and Standard Arguments

The philosophy of science has historically attempted to justify why science works and what makes it uniquely reliable.

• Aristotle and Deductive Certainty: Aristotle argued in Posterior Analytics that true scientific knowledge (episteme) is achieved through deductive syllogisms starting from self-evident first principles, aiming to understand the telos (purpose) of things.
• Francis Bacon and Inductivism: In Novum Organum (1620), Bacon rejected Aristotelian deduction, arguing for systematic induction—gathering unbiased empirical facts and slowly ascending to general axioms.
• David Hume and the Problem of Induction: Hume demonstrated that induction has no logical justification; past regularities do not logically guarantee future occurrences, creating a foundational crisis for empiricism.
• Logical Positivism (The Vienna Circle): Early 20th-century thinkers like Rudolf Carnap and A.J. Ayer argued for Verificationism—a statement is only scientifically meaningful if it is empirically verifiable or logically tautological.
• Karl Popper and Falsificationism: Rejecting verificationism, Popper argued that science advances through conjectures and refutations. A theory is scientific not because it can be proven true, but because it is falsifiable.
• Thomas Kuhn and Paradigm Shifts: In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn argued that science does not progress linearly toward truth. Instead, it operates within sociological paradigms ("normal science") until anomalies trigger a crisis and a revolutionary paradigm shift, rendering competing paradigms incommensurable.
• Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend: Lakatos attempted to rescue rationality via "research programmes" with protected hard cores. Feyerabend, in Against Method (1975), argued for epistemological anarchism ("anything goes"), showing that strict methodological rules would have strangled historical breakthroughs like Galileo's.
• Realism vs. Anti-Realism: Standard debates pit Scientific Realists (who argue mature theories are approximately true descriptions of an unobservable reality, supported by the "No Miracles Argument") against Instrumentalists/Constructive Empiricists like Bas van Fraassen (who argue theories are merely useful tools for saving the phenomena).

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4. Where Philosophy of Science Fails—and Turns Against Itself

Traditional philosophy of science frequently fails because it imposes external, prescriptive ideals onto a messy, adaptive human activity:

• The Normative Trap: Philosophers often dictate rules that practicing scientists routinely violate (e.g., ignoring falsifying data when an instrument is suspected of error, or holding onto flawed models because no better alternative exists).
• Philosophy Against Itself: Science, when functioning on its own terms, operates pragmatically—it does not require a claim on the Absolute to build a bridge, sequence a genome, or predict an eclipse. Yet, the history of the philosophy of science has been obsessed with securing an absolute metaphysical or epistemic foundation ("Truth"). By demanding that science justify itself against absolute skepticism, philosophy of science undermines the very practice it seeks to explain, turning a functional methodology into an unresolved epistemological crisis.

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5. Methodology Without Truth-Finding or Falsification

When stripped of philosophical baggage, scientific methodology is neither a quest for absolute truth nor a strict execution of Popperian falsification. Instead, it is an iterative calibration loop:

• Perturbation and Response: Scientists manipulate variables (or isolate natural variations) to observe how a system responds.
• Error-Bounded Approximation: Rather than proving a hypothesis true or false, methodology establishes the domain of validity—the specific boundary conditions under which a model reliably tracks reality within acceptable margins of error (e.g., Newtonian mechanics is not "false"; it is an accurate approximation at low speeds and weak gravitational fields).

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6. Structural Asemics, the Asemic Ghost, and Interpretive Panic

Viewing the history of the philosophy of science through a semiotic and structural lens reveals why philosophers repeatedly mischaracterize scientific practice:

• Structural Asemics: In art and semiotics, asemic writing mimics the visual structure of text without carrying literal semantic meaning. Similarly, the mathematical formalisms and experimental protocols of science often act as structural asemics—self-consistent, operational syntaxes that manipulate variables and generate accurate predictions without inherently possessing metaphysical "meaning" or a one-to-one mapping to ultimate reality.
• The Asemic Ghost Framework: Philosophers of science suffer from an inability to accept that a purely operational, syntactic system can work without a metaphysical soul. They project an "Asemic Ghost" into the machine—insisting that behind functional equations must sit a ghostly, absolute truth ("Laws of Nature," "Essences," or "Noumenal Reality") that animates the equations.
• The Interpretive Panic Framework: Whenever a scientific paradigm shifts (e.g., from Newtonian space to Einsteinian spacetime, or from classical determinism to quantum superposition), the Asemic Ghost vanishes. This triggers Interpretive Panic among philosophers: the fear that if the old metaphysical interpretation was an illusion, science is entirely irrational, relativistic, or unmoored from reality. Much of 20th-century philosophy of science is simply crisis management for this Interpretive Panic.

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7. Science Without Teleology or Behavioral Rules

To understand science cleanly, we must strip away both purpose and policing:

• No Teleology: Science is not moving toward a final, complete "Theory of Everything" or an ultimate epistemic destination. It is an open-ended evolutionary process of adaptation to new instruments, new environments, and new data scales.
• No Rules of Behavior: There is no singular "Scientific Method" police force. Scientists use intuition, luck, aesthetic preference, computer simulations, brute-force trial and error, and rigorous deduction interchangeably. What makes work scientific is not the behavior used to generate an idea, but the interface through which the idea is tested against physical constraints.

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8. Commonalities in Works of Science

If we examine actual works of science—from Mendel’s pea plant tallies to LIGO’s gravitational wave detections—three empirical commonalities emerge across all eras and disciplines:

1. External Constraint: The work subjects its claims to an external, non-negotiable physical reality that can push back against human expectation.
2. Reproducible Alignment: It establishes procedures (experimental setups, observational protocols, mathematical derivations) that allow independent agents to align their observations and achieve convergent outputs.
3. Invariance Identification: It isolates stable relationships (constants, symmetries, conservation laws, or statistical regularities) that remain invariant across changing contexts.

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9. Pattern Matching and Pattern Explanation

At its cognitive and computational core, science is a two-stage engine of pattern processing:

• Pattern Matching (Detection): Using instruments and statistical filters to extract signal from noise. Pattern matching identifies that a regularity exists (e.g., correlating smoking with lung cancer, or noticing spectral lines in starlight).
• Pattern Explanation (Generative Modeling): Constructing a lower-dimensional, generative mechanism that reproduces the matched pattern. Explanation in science is not uncovering metaphysical "why"; it is building a causal or mathematical compression that can generate the observed pattern from simpler premises (e.g., explaining spectral lines via quantized electron energy levels).

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10. A Working Theory of Science

Synthesizing these elements yields a coherent, non-metaphysical Theory of Science:

Science is an adaptive, constraint-bound system of algorithmic compression. It operates by interfacing human cognition and instrumentation with physical reality to detect invariant patterns, construct generative models that compress those patterns, and iteratively map the boundary conditions within which those models remain predictive. It requires no teleological endpoint, no absolute truth claims, and no rigid behavioral orthodoxy—only continuous, self-correcting friction against the physical world.

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Conclusion: Breaking Out of the Philosophy of Science

Abandoning the traditional philosophy of science in favor of a working Theory of Science resolves centuries of manufactured epistemic anxiety. When we stop demanding that science serve as a secular theology providing absolute truth, we no longer experience Interpretive Panic when models evolve or paradigms shift. A working Theory of Science treats scientific theories not as fragile claims about ultimate reality, but as durable, high-precision navigational tools. By understanding science as pattern compression and boundary mapping, practitioners, educators, and policymakers can focus on what actually makes science effective: building better instruments, identifying deeper invariances, and rigorously testing the limits of our models.

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"There Is No 'Hard Problem of Consciousness'" - An Asemics - AI / EZE, 2026

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Carlo Rovelli's May 2026 Noema Magazine essay, "There Is No 'Hard Problem Of Consciousness'"*, attempts to dissolve the modern mind-body problem as an illusion of lingering dualism, yet in doing so, his argument inadvertently triggers the very semiotic breakdowns described by structural asemics, the Asemic Ghost Framework, and the Interpretive Panic Framework.

By applying these three analytical lenses directly to the mechanics of Rovelli’s text and the philosophical debate he enters, we uncover a profound paradox: Rovelli’s effort to eliminate the "ghost" of dualism relies on a radical redefinition of language that strips foundational terms of their referents, leaving behind an asemic shell.

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Dissolving the Ghost: A Semiotic and Philosophical Critique of Carlo Rovelli’s "There Is No 'Hard Problem Of Consciousness'"

Introduction

In May 2026, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli published "There Is No 'Hard Problem Of Consciousness'" in Noema Magazine, intervening in one of the most contentious debates in contemporary philosophy of mind and neuroscience. Writing from the standpoint of relational physicalism, Rovelli argues that the "hard problem" is not a genuine scientific mystery, but a conceptual artifact generated by smuggling [?] medieval [?] dualism into modern inquiry. While Rovelli’s essay succeeds as a rhetorical exercise in scientific demystification, applying semiotic and critical theory reveals deep structural vulnerabilities in his thesis. When examined through the lenses of structural asemics, the Asemic Ghost Framework, and the Interpretive Panic Framework, Rovelli’s dismissal of the hard problem appears less like a definitive solution and more like a crisis of signification—one where language loses its purchase on subjective experience even as the author claims to save it.

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Who is Carlo Rovelli?

Carlo Rovelli is a prominent Italian theoretical physicist and public intellectual, renowned as one of the founders of loop quantum gravity and the architect of the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics (RQM). Through international bestsellers such as Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Helgoland, Rovelli has championed a worldview in which reality is not composed of isolated substances with intrinsic properties, but of dynamic networks of interactions. For Rovelli, physical properties exist only in relation to other physical systems. This relational ontology forms the bedrock of his philosophical interventions, motivating his attempt to collapse the traditional boundary between the objective observer and the subjective mind.

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Context and History of the "Hard Problem"

To evaluate Rovelli’s critique, it is necessary to situate it within the genealogy of the mind-body problem. The "hard problem of consciousness" was formally articulated by Australian philosopher David Chalmers during a landmark 1994 conference in Tucson, Arizona, and subsequently developed in his 1995 paper "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind.

Chalmers partitioned the scientific study of consciousness into two distinct domains:

• The "Easy" Problems: Explaining the functional and cognitive mechanisms of the brain—such as sensory discrimination, information integration, behavioral control, and verbal reportability. These are "easy" only in a methodological sense: standard neuroscientific and computational models of structure and function are theoretically sufficient to solve them.
• The "Hard" Problem: Explaining why and how these physical, structural processes give rise to subjective, first-person experience—often termed qualia (the felt redness of red, the sharp pang of pain) or what philosopher Thomas Nagel famously called "what it is like" to be a conscious organism.

Historically, Chalmers’ formulation is the secular descendant of René Descartes' 17th-century substance dualism, which severed reality into res cogitans (unextended thinking mind) and res extensa (extended material body). In the 19th century, physicist John Tyndall highlighted the "intellectually impassable" chasm between molecular brain activity and conscious states, and in 1983, philosopher Joseph Levine coined the "explanatory gap" to describe our inability to logically deduce subjective feelings from physical neurology. Chalmers crystallized this lineage through thought experiments such as philosophical zombies—hypothetical beings physically identical to humans down to the last quark, yet entirely devoid of inner conscious experience—to argue that physicalism leaves subjective experience unexplained.

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Rovelli’s Argument and Answer

In "There Is No 'Hard Problem Of Consciousness'", Rovelli contends that Chalmers’ hard problem is a pseudo-problem generated by a flawed starting premise. Rovelli constructs his answer across five key moves:

1. Historical Pattern of Cultural Resistance: Rovelli frames the consciousness debate as the latest chapter in humanity’s recurring emotional resistance to scientific unification. Just as Renaissance thinkers resisted the idea that the heavens and Earth share the same physics, and Victorians resisted evolutionary kinship with animals, modern thinkers resist physicalism out of an unspoken anxiety over losing a "transcendent soul."
2. Complexity Over Metaphysical Mystery: Consciousness is difficult to explain not because it violates physical laws, but because it is an extraordinarily complex biological phenomenon, analogous to turbulence or protein folding.
3. Perspectival Monism (Seeing From Within): Drawing on Russian polymath Alexander Bogdanov, Rovelli rejects the notion of science as an objective, "God's-eye" view from outside the universe. Science is the collective organization of human experience from within nature. The divide between a third-person fMRI scan and first-person subjective feeling is not an ontological chasm between two substances, nor an explanatory gap—it is merely a perspectival difference. A brain process experienced by that brain feels like consciousness; the exact same process observed from the outside looks like firing neurons.
4. Refuting Philosophical Zombies: Rovelli dismisses Chalmers' philosophical zombie argument as self-contradictory. A molecule-for-molecule physical duplicate of a human would inevitably possess the exact neural mechanisms that compel introspection and verbal reports of inner experience. Asserting that such a being lacks "true" inner awareness requires smuggling dualism into the premise—assuming upfront that consciousness is something extra beyond physics.
5. The "Soul" by Subtraction: Rather than denying consciousness or calling it an illusion (as strict illusionists do), Rovelli affirms that humans possess "souls," spiritual lives, and qualia. However, he defines these as abstractions obtained by subtraction—macroscopic, coarse-grained descriptions of salient brain processes, much like referring to a "kitchen table" rather than a dense cloud of quantum particles.

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Reception, Criticisms, and Engaged Theories

Rovelli’s essay provoked sharp division across neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of mind:

• Supportive Reception: Neuroscientists and physicalists praised Rovelli for cutting through philosophical obfuscation. MIT neuroscientist Earl K. Miller endorsed Rovelli’s thesis by declaring the hard problem "just dualism in sheep's clothing", while computer scientist Andreas Maier commended Rovelli for grounding mental language in high-level physical operations.
• Philosophical Criticisms: Philosophers of mind widely critiqued Rovelli for committing a strawman fallacy and conflating distinct categories:
  • Epistemological vs. Ontological Confusion: Critics noted that Chalmers’ hard problem does not require Cartesian substance dualism; rather, it identifies an epistemological limitation—that an exhaustive inventory of third-person structural and functional facts does not logically entail why first-person feeling exists.
  • Psychologizing the Opposition: Philosopher James Michael Corrigan argued that Rovelli avoids rigorous counter-argument by psychologizing philosophers as clinging to religious souls, while simultaneously hollowing out the word "soul" into pure materialism.
  • Pre-Reflective Self-Awareness: German philosopher Manfred Frank countered in IAI News that Rovelli overlooks how consciousness involves an immediate, pre-reflective self-familiarity that precedes any subject-object split, making it fundamentally unlike external physical objects.
  • Self-Refutation: Critics from non-materialist traditions argued that if all scientific knowledge is purely embodied, perspectival, and circular, Rovelli undermines the objective footing required to make universal claims about physical reality.
• Theories Engaged: Rovelli explicitly or implicitly engages with Cartesian Dualism, Chalmers’ Property Dualism and Panpsychism, Baruch Spinoza’s Neutral Monism, Kantian Transcendental Subjectivity, Alexander Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism, and Emergent Functionalism.

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The Concept of Consciousness in the Essay

In Rovelli’s framework, consciousness is conceptualized not as a fundamental cosmic property (as in panpsychism) nor as an immaterial substance, but as an embodied, relational, macroscopic natural phenomenon. Consciousness is the internal perspective of complex physical interactions occurring within a biological organism. It is entirely real—just as a sunset remains real after we understand planetary rotation—and consists of the brain’s high-level, coarse-grained information processing experienced from the inside.

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Semiotic Breakdown: Structural Asemics, the Asemic Ghost, and Interpretive Panic

While Rovelli presents his essay as a triumph of clear, demystified scientific language, examining the text—and the broader debate it inhabits—through semiotic theory exposes critical points where signification collapses.

1. Structural Asemics: The Collapse of Signification

In poetics and visual theory, asemic structures retain the outward form, syntax, and rhythm of legible writing while evacuating concrete semantic reference. Throughout the consciousness debate, and acutely within Rovelli’s essay, key terms become structurally asemic—preserving the grammatical appearance of meaningful explanation while losing their referential grip:

• In Chalmers’ Discourse (From Rovelli’s View): To Rovelli, phrases like "explanatory gap," "qualia," and "what it is like" are structurally asemic. They mimic the syntax of legitimate scientific questions ("Why does X produce Y?"), yet because they point to an ineffable non-structural excess beyond all physical functions, they refer to nothing concrete. They are linguistic gestures shaped like problems without semantic content.
• In Rovelli’s Own Text: Paradoxically, Rovelli reproduces this exact asemic breakdown in his own affirmative vocabulary. When Rovelli insists that humans have "souls," "spiritual lives," and "inner experience," yet defines them strictly as "abstractions obtained by subtraction" of firing neurons, he retains the resonant signifiers of human interiority while stripping away the phenomenal referent that gave those words meaning in the first place. Similarly, his central explanatory bridge—that a physical process is simply "experienced from within"—functions structurally like a solution, yet "from within" remains semantically opaque: it gestures toward subjectivity without explaining how matter becomes a subject. Signification breaks down at the precise hinge of his argument.

2. The Asemic Ghost Framework: Dualism as a Spectral Trace

To claim, as Rovelli does, that Cartesian mind-body duality is an ... injected problem ... within Chalmers’ work is to diagnose the hard problem under the Asemic Ghost Framework. In this framework, an "asemic ghost" is a spectral trace of an abandoned metaphysics—a lingering linguistic imprint that haunts contemporary discourse long after its ontological substance has been discredited.

• Rovelli treats Chalmers’ "hard problem" not as an empirical discovery, but as a ghost in the syntax: the residual shadow of Descartes’ res cogitans projected onto modern neuroscience. Because we still possess the grammatical habit of separating the "observer" from the "observed," we hallucinate an immaterial ghost occupying the machine.
• Yet the Asemic Ghost Framework cuts both ways. By declaring the hard problem a Cartesian ghost, Rovelli fails to banish the phantom; instead, his own "perspectival difference" ("from the outside" vs. "from within") smuggles the dualist spatial metaphor back into his monism. Even in a purely physical universe, the distinction between inside and outside re-inscribes a spectral boundary—an asemic ghost of the very subject-object divide Rovelli claims to have exorcised.

3. The Interpretive Panic Framework: The Non-Problem as Defense Mechanism

To address the hard problem of consciousness as a "non-problem" is to engage the issue through the Interpretive Panic Framework. Interpretive panic occurs when an explanatory paradigm encounters an anomaly that threatens its totalizing coherence, triggering a defensive reflex that declares the anomaly unintelligible, illegitimate, or non-existent rather than revising the paradigm.

• Rovelli’s Diagnosis of Panic: Rovelli explicitly accuses philosophers and dualists of interpretive panic—arguing that when physicalism threatens the traditional notion of the human soul, thinkers panic and invent a "hard problem" to rescue human exceptionalism.
• Rovelli’s Own Interpretive Panic: Conversely, Rovelli’s flat dismissal of the hard problem ("I fail to make sense of the claim," "There is no hard problem") exemplifies the interpretive panic of orthodox physicalism. Confronted with the stubborn irreducibility of first-person experience—an anomaly that resists third-person structural mapping—Rovelli does not solve the puzzle; he invalidates the question. Declaring a foundational phenomenological mystery a "non-problem" is a classic symptom of interpretive panic: when the semiotic tools of physics cannot capture subjective feeling, the framework protects its sovereignty by declaring the uncapturable referent an illusion of language.

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Conclusion: Efficacy of the Essay and Evaluation of Structural Asemics

Efficacy of Rovelli’s Essay:
As a work of public philosophy and scientific rhetoric, Rovelli’s essay is highly effective at exposing how easily metaphysical assumptions can masquerade as empirical mysteries. His historical comparisons—linking consciousness debates to past resistance against heliocentrism and evolutionary biology—powerfully challenge the intuition that human subjectivity requires an exception to natural law. However, as a philosophical resolution to the hard problem, the essay falls short. By reducing an epistemological and phenomenological puzzle to a psychological attachment to Cartesian dualism, Rovelli talks past the core challenge articulated by Chalmers, Nagel, and Levine.

Evaluation of Structural Asemics in Advancing (or Hindering) the Argument:
Applying structural asemics reveals both the power and the fatal limitation of Rovelli’s argument. On one hand, structural asemics furthers Rovelli’s critique of Chalmers by exposing how terms like "qualia" and "philosophical zombies" can operate as empty grammatical shells—mimicking scientific inquiry while pointing to an unobservable, non-functional void. On the other hand, structural asemics ultimately undermines Rovelli’s constructive thesis. In attempting to rescue words like "soul" and "consciousness" while reducing them to coarse-grained physical abstractions, Rovelli’s own language collapses into asemic hollowness—retaining the comforting shapes of human interiority while evacuating their lived, subjective referent. Ultimately, structural asemics demonstrates that neither Rovelli’s physicalism nor Chalmers’ dualism has escaped the crisis of signification at the heart of consciousness: our language remains structurally unable to bridge the gap between third-person mechanism and first-person being.

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