How Can Science Explain Consciousness?

Section 4: The role of science to explain consciousness When I see my dog and my cat, I realize how differently they behave – I think the cat is somehow more mysterious –, but how I could know that they have inner states? Likewise, people have different behaviours: if they are at a football match they behave differently than in an art gallery. We suppose that they have different inner states, but how do we know this? There are different approaches to take to this question, but fundamentally the question is of how body and mind interact. We live in a physical wold, and therefore to know something about the world requires some empirical work, in this sense, science has something to say, and it might be claimed that science could help to determine
The evidence so far from neuroscience, biology, linguistic or evolutionary biology – among other empirical fields – suggests that consciousness is to be found in the brain. However, science has not been able to show how consciousness comes into being. This has generated two contrasting views about whether or not consciousness can ever be fully understood. This section analyses these two positions with the principal question of this thesis in mind: is consciousness the source of intentionality? Consciousness needs to be understood as part of the physical history of the brain, as part of the natural world, but to what extent we will be able to do so is debatable. On the one hand, Robert Van Gulick is optimistic about understanding consciousness in physical terms; he believes that empirical research may help to close the gap between the brain and the mental. On the other hand, Colin McGinn claims that the problem of consciousness escapes human understanding and that science – at least as currently conceived – will not reveal what consciousness
McGinn suggests that, “[t]he mystery persists. I think the time has come to admit candidly that we cannot resolve the mystery” (McGinn, 1989, p. 529). McGinn suggests that “consciousness is a property of the brain” (McGinn, 1989/2002, p. 530) but he also suggests that we cannot know more than that. He famously asks, “how can technicolor phenomenology arises from soggy gray matter?” (McGinn, 1989/2002, p. 259). This seems to be the seminal question that every path of the discussion leads to. McGinn’s own point of view is that we as humans are “cognitive closed” to ever understanding what consciousness is (McGinn, 1989, p. 529). Can this view be justified? Let us firstly review Mc Ginn’s supporting arguments; in justifying “Cognitive Closure” (McGinn, 1989/2002, p.529), he argues that “different species have different sorts of minds, such that certain things are accessible to some kinds of minds but not to others” (McGinn, 1989, p.530). Certainly, although different species share the need for water and food and to understand members of the same species, McGinn could be right when he believes that “what is needed to be known by a monkey is not required to be known by a rat, or what it is required to be known by a human is not necessarily the same as what is required to be known by a monkey”