It seems wild to me to write a (popular) article about consciousness in the year 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room: we are able to devise computer programs of increasing complexity that replicate more and more behaviors that were once the sole domain of humans, and at what point do we consider such computers to have experience in the sense that we have, and the sense in which calculators and thermostats do not. It seems that Rovelli is content to say that we should call experience the thing that the brain does, which is all well and good if you're a physicalist (and I am) but it does not help you at all explain which features of the brain are necessary for experience.

I think it also helps to sharpen this debate to remember that there is a moral dimension: many have adopted moral systems that widen their sphere of concern and care from the self to the community to the nation to the whole of mankind, usually under the intuitive precept that it is bad to make someone else experience suffering. Should we expand our moral conception of responsibility or care to non-human patients, and if so, which?