Why science will never explain phenomenal consciousness (psychology today)

[C C]

Why science will never explain consciousness
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/...sciousness

INTRO: This post was co-authored with Ralph Weir, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lincoln. He is the author of "The Mind-Body Problem and Metaphysics: An Argument from Consciousness to Mental Substance" as well as academic articles on philosophy of mind, AI and human enhancement, metaphysics, and religion.

KEY POINTS: Phenomenal consciousness, unlike functional “consciousness,” isn’t definable in terms of physical processes. All science can do is correlate phenomenal consciousness with certain physical processes. Science can’t explain why these processes don’t operate “in the dark,” without phenomenal consciousness.

EXCERPTS: . . .It’s relatively easy to explain how an arrangement of particles could be functionally conscious. That’s because a “function” can be defined in wholly physical terms. It’s just about particles moving in particular ways in response to stimuli. It involves nothing more experiential than, say, an automatic door. For this reason, the term “functional consciousness” is a bit of a misnomer.

[...] If we’re looking for physical science to explain phenomenal consciousness rather than just observe the physical properties with which it’s correlated, we’re necessarily going to be disappointed. And here’s why.

If we want to explain why water is a liquid at room temperature, we can say [...] This explanation works because there’s a conceptual connection between the weakness of the hydrogen bonds and the macroscopic properties of liquidity, such as the way a liquid takes the shape of its container.

A physical explanation of phenomenal consciousness would require the same kind of conceptual connection between phenomenal consciousness and some physical activity. There would have to be some kind of particle movement that clearly could not happen without conscious experience. But no such conceptual connection exists.

That’s why, for example, a colorblind person can’t learn what it’s like to see color just by studying a textbook on the mechanisms of visual perception. And it’s why you can’t be certain from the physiology and behavior of other people whether colors look the same to them as to you... (MORE - details)
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I wouldn't necessarily say "never". It's remotely possible that a simulation of the brain or an AI model strictly modeled on such might have experiences in the future, and be able to report on them to humans. In that case, researchers could tweak its processing structure in various ways, and it could provide information about what internally happened in response (as well as generate images and audio of its private manifestations). Taking that data, some theorists might eventually devise a paradigm and metaphysics that integrated and tentatively explained the effects, eventually resulting in a science of phenomenal consciousness that could predict results.

[Magical Realist]

"Colin McGinn is probably the most prominent of the New Mysterians - people who basically offer a counsel of despair about consciousness. Look, he says, we've been at this long enough - isn't it time to confess that we're never going to solve the problem? Not that there's anything magic or insoluble about it really: it's just that our minds aren't up to it. Everything has its limitations, and not being able to understand consciousness just happens to be one of ours. Once we realise this, however, the philosophical worry basically goes away.

McGinn doesn't exactly mean that human beings are just too stupid; nor is he offering the popular but mistaken argument that the human brain cannot understand itself because containers cannot contain themselves (so that we can never absorb enough data to grasp our own workings). No: instead he introduces the idea of cognitive closure. This means that the operations the human mind can carry out are incapable in principle of taking us to a proper appreciation of what consciousness is and how it works. It's as if, on a chess board, you were limited to diagonal moves: you could go all over the board but never link the black and white squares. That wouldn't mean that one colour was magic, or immaterial. Equally, from God's point of view, there's probably no mystery about consciousness at all - it may well be a pretty simple affair when you understand it - but we can no more take the God's-eye point of view than a dog could adopt a human understanding of physics."---- http://www.consciousentities.com/mcginn.htm