Consciousness as a Concrete Physical Phenomenon

Abstract

Why any type of neural activation is associated with subjective, conscious experience is a fundamental unsolved question in neuroscience. To bridge the gap between neural activity and conscious experience, one seemingly must tie together two very different entities. The paradigmatic view in consciousness science is that subjective experiences are private and cannot be scientifically observed or described: science can only discover correlations between subjective experiences and their neural realizers, but never observe or describe the experiences themselves. We present a metatheory of consciousness that explains how subjective experiences are related to empirical observations and models, and why the two appear so different from each other. We argue that consciousness is a concrete physical process that causally interacts with other physical phenomena. This entails that consciousness can be empirically observed and characterized. The reason why subjective experiences and empirical observations and models of them appear so different is explained by what we call the observer-observed distinction. Empirical observations are always distinct from the observer, but a subject and her experiences constitute a single physical-biological system. We argue that once science has completely described 1) the constitutive neural mechanisms that are isomorphic with experiences, 2) the etiological mechanisms that experiences are based on, and 3) their causal power, then science has provided an exhaustive description of phenomenology. Our conclusion is that, if we accept this framework we call Naturalistic Monism, consciousness collapses into a standard problem of science.