Is consciousness material? Can it be explained outside of metaphysics?

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No, it isn’t, and therefore no, it can’t. And this drives physicalists nuts, or it would if they thought hard enough about it.

You can only get so far by analyzing the behavior of a system. Eventually you have to reverse engineer it, and deep analysis eventually becomes reverse engineering if you go deep enough.

Our consciousness is so much like the running program of a computer that we know the sorts of things that will happen when we turn off various parts of it. Behaviorally, our minds are extremely well-studied. I can, just by browsing Wikipedia, answer just about every single behavioral question I can think of about us. Science has already done that work.

Despite all of that work, we still have no idea what a fundamental theory of psychology would even look like. Think about this for a few seconds. If you study something long enough, you can understand not just how it works, but why. If you stare at the operations of a computer long enough, you can get a sense for the fundamental math of computation. You can fit your theoretical understanding of that computer into your mental map of how the world works.

Theory is a top-down understanding, behavior is a bottom up observation. When things are super-complex, and you don’t have a working theory, then you need an order of magnitude more behavioral analysis in order to get closer to a theory. You keep forming questions that you can answer, and do studies to validate your hypothesis, then use the results of your experiment to plan further experiments. This is how science works.

But there’s a gigantic world of stuff out there that doesn’t respond well to this kind of scientific analysis. These things don’t operate deterministically, so no amount of science is going to get you any closer to a deterministic understanding, and science is geared for finding deterministic causal relationships.

But we can study such things regardless. How do we study them? Well, the academy has a word for it, humanities. The humanities study non-physical things, like stories, history, culture. They blend smoothly into the scientific, and if one field’s mix of science vs. humanities doesn’t suit you, you can find another field that will allow you to better apply your brain to the problem.

If consciousness were physical, then we could study it with the tools of physical science. Both the theory and the behavior. But we can’t. We can study the behavior with physical science, but in order to approach theory, we have to use a humanities approach.