The Seamless World and the Radical Individual: How the D×MA Model Begins Where Rovelli Ends

Rovelli (2026) argues that the Hard Problem of consciousness is a cultural artefact — a residue of dualist thinking that falsely treats consciousness as metaphysically separate from the natural world. We arrive at the same destination by a different route and, from that shared starting point, take one further step. If consciousness is genuinely relational — constituted by world-engagement rather than produced inside a skull — then a deeper paradox demands resolution: why is consciousness, despite arising from universal physical laws, irreducibly and intimately mine? My red is not your red. My grief is not yours. The world-openness of consciousness does not dissolve its radical individuality; it intensifies the question of how that individuality arises. Drawing on Heidegger, Goethe, Rovelli’s relational ontology, and recent advances in thermodynamics and neuroscience, we propose that this paradox admits a physical answer. The key is the root structure of consciousness: its irreducible individuality is not a residue that resists explanation but a thermodynamic consequence, constituted by each organism’s unique and unrepeatable relational history. Central to this answer is the recognition that valence — the primitive distinction between pleasure and aversion — is not a feature added to consciousness from the outside, but the most fundamentalform consciousness takes. From Aplysia to the human subject, every encounter with the world is always already evaluative. There is no neutral qualia. The Hard Problem does not require a solution. It requires a better starting point: Q(t) = D_eff(t) × MA(t), where D_eff is instantaneous world-engagement density and MA is historical assembly depth. Keywords: Hard Problem of consciousness, relational ontology, valence, proto-affectivity, thermodynamics, D×MA model, Rovelli, phylogenetic continuity