Uh oh...

...things don't look so good with Lee Smolin's new book.  I'll reserve final judgment until I actually read it, but here's an excerpt from page 270 referenced in this inverview:

The problem of consciousness is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don’t know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe — through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains.

Oh dear! It's a confused morass of the "hard problem," essentialism, and weirdly enough Kant. The interview also notes that he apparently thinks highly of David Chalmers.

Has Smolin "gone emeritus?" I'm sure certain string theorists would say he did a long time ago!