Carlo Rovelli: Can we know how it feels to be someone else?

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Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature. Can we ever truly know what it feels like to be someone, or something, else? Is the mind separate from the body? What even is life? Where could it possibly come from? Where could the universe come from? These are the questions Rovelli has a stab at answering in his new book On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy . In particular he draws on quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern thought to argue that the world is not made of separate categories…