> Rovelli is arguing (I think) that we need to fundamentally view consciousness as a natural phenomenon - albeit one that is extremely complex and poorly understood.

But you can view consciousness as a natural phenomenon without being reductionist. In a Hempel's Dilemma-like turn, you could say something like: "consciousness, like mass, is a property of arrangements of matter and exists wherever matter is arranged in a particular way. Disrupt the arrangement, as with anesthetics, and the consciousness goes away."

You end up with something like integrated information theory: https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-conscio...

From such a perspective, the article's byline, "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", is true. Like mass or charge, consciousness is merely another property or feature of stuff of combinations of matter that exist in the physical universe.

But there's still a "hard problem of consciousness" with such a theory. The distinguishing feature of qualia-like consciousness remains: it can only be properly verified from the inside. Researchers may devise theories that say "if property X holds, then the lump of matter is conscious" (like Tononi is doing with IIT). And the theory they develop may be quite tight - for all actions where it predicts temporary loss of consciousness, people exposed to the experiment say "I wasn't conscious at that time". But until they can solve the hard problem - being able to detect the what-its-like from the outside, the hard problem remains.

Though, as you're saying, if you just want something that predicts observable outcomes, then consciousness theories that say "this anesthetic-like thing produces what, to the outside observer, is indistinguishable from loss of consciousness", might be good enough.