Materialism makes the dubious claim that consciousness is simply another function of the brain. But neuroscience has yet to explain how a brain can be conscious. The explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness is such that some philosophers now believe materialism to be unable to explain it.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
The hard problem of consciousness and the reason why physics may not explain it
Why consciousness cannot be a computation and is not a material process
Why the explanatory gap has rendered materialism incomplete
What the Bible teaches about the soul and consciousness
Why panpsychism or emergence does not solve the problem
1. The Hard Problem Materialism Cannot Solve
Philosopher David Chalmers has distinguished between the easy and the hard problems of consciousness. The former refers to what neuroscience can tell us about consciousness - how the brain processes sensory information, what part of the brain perceives color and so on. The hard problem is simply why consciousness occurs at all. Why does any perceptual experience have meaning? Why do colors appear the way they do? Why is a particular experience pleasant or unpleasant? We may know what happens in the brain when a person sees the color red, but this information will say nothing about why it happens. It is an entirely different type of problem.
Materialism has no answer to the hard problem. It can tell us what occurs in the brain while a person is perceiving the color red, but not why the experience takes place. David Chalmers even says that God could have created a purely material world where the same physical processes took place without there being any consciousness, with no sense of feeling or awareness. The hard problem is an issue for all materialisms
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2. Why Consciousness Cannot Be Computed
Consciousness is supposedly a purely material process, but computers are also material devices. If consciousness is a process like other physical processes, it should therefore be able to be computed. According to some researchers like Subhash Kak from Ohio State University, you can determine whether a program will halt simply by knowing how it will behave, but humans can do what computers cannot. Kak therefore claims that while humans are able to stop thinking about one thing and move on to another, computers cannot guarantee they will ever be able to do so. If consciousness can be computed, as materialists believe, this should not be a problem, but it apparently is.
Furthermore, researchers believe that human consciousness consists of distributed processes in the brain that can occur simultaneously in different parts of the brain, which actually prevents consciousness from being a material process.
3. The Explanatory Gap Is Growing
Materialism promised that as our knowledge of the brain and its workings improved, consciousness and its mysteries would become apparent. Instead, the more neuroscience uncovered the structure of the brain, the more inaccessible consciousness became. We can know what parts of the brain are responsible for a particular experience, but these insights will not tell us anything about what that perceptual experience is like. The explanatory gap is not only real, it seems to be widening.
Materialists claim that consciousness emerges when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, but this does little to explain what is going on. Panpsychism, a theory that states that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter in the same way that mass or charge is, only raises more questions. If consciousness is not inexplicably tied to matter, there is no need to claim it is a fundamental property of it. If it does emerge, materialism has failed.
4. What the Bible Says About Consciousness
Genesis 2:7 tells us that God created Adam, an embryo of flesh, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and he became a living soul. The Hebrew word used here for soul is nephesh and it refers to the physical body as well as the conscious being that occupies it. Paul speaks about the whole spirit, soul and body being kept pure in 1 Thessalonians 5:23. He sees them as three separate aspects of man. The Bible does not give us some exotic esoteric teaching about consciousness being something beyond matter. It sees our conscious soul as something intrinsic to our material bodies and that it is a fundamental aspect of who we are as humans. It is an observable fact, not some abstract unknown entity.
WHAT YOU LEARNED
The Hard Problem: Knowing what goes on physically in the brain does not explain why we experience consciousness.
Non-Computational Nature: Consciousness does not occur in computations, but is the underlying reason behind why we perceive.
Widening Gap: The growing explanatory gap demonstrates that materialism does not fully understand how material brains can be conscious.
Panpsychism’s Failure: Panpsychism simply renames the problem as a characteristic of matter rather than solving how consciousness occurs.
Biblical Soul: The Bible teaches that consciousness is fundamental to man, separating us from the rest of the physical creation.
