We have made agreat deal of progressin understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behavior.
There isgrowing suspicionthat conventional scientific methods will never be able to answer these questions.
Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.
The problem of consciousness, however, is radically unlike any other scientific problem.
One reason is that consciousness is unobservable.
You cant look inside someones head and see their feelings and experiences.
Of course, scientists are used to dealing with unobservables.
Electrons, for example, are too small to be seen.
But in the unique case of consciousness, the thing to be explained cannot be observed.
We know that consciousness exists not through experiments but through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.
Only you’ve got the option to experience your emotions.Olga Danylenko
So how can science ever explain it?
But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this methodology breaks down.
But the accumulation of such correlations does not amount to a theory of consciousness.
What we ultimately want is to explainwhyconscious experiences are correlated with brain activity.
Why is it that such activity in the hypothalamus comes along with a feeling of hunger?
In fact, we should not be surprised that our standard scientific method struggles to deal with consciousness.
This worldview forms the backdrop of science to this day.
Their starting point was that physical science doesnt really tell us what matter is.
This may seem bizarre, but it turns out that physics is confined to telling us about thebehaviorof matter.
The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.
But thenew wave of panpsychismlacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view.
There is only matter nothing spiritual or supernatural but matter can be described from two perspectives.
This means that mindismatter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness.
Before you write that off, consider this.
Consciousnesscan vary in complexity.
What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview.
Nothing less than a revolution is called for, and its already on its way.
This article is republished fromThe ConversationbyPhilip Goff, Assistant Professor of Philosophy,Durham Universityunder a Creative Commons license.
