The mystery of consciousness shows there may be a limit to what science alone can achieve

https://theconversation.com/the-mystery-of-consciousness-shows-there-may-be-a-limit-to-what-science-alone-can-achieve-225034

The progress of science in the last 400 years is mind-blowing. Who would have thought we’d be able to trace the history of our universe to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and the quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.

For all of these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same thing as “scientism”, which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness is revealing, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.

Truth without science

How is it possible to find out about reality without doing science? The distinguishing feature of philosophical theories is that they are “empirically equivalent”, which means you can’t decide between them with an experiment.

Take the example of my area of research: the philosophy of consciousness. Some philosophers think that consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain – this is the “physicalist” position. Others think it’s the other way around: consciousness is primary, and the physical world emerges from consciousness. A version of this is the “panpsychist” view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality, with the word deriving from the two Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul or mind).

Still others think that both consciousness and the physical world are fundamental but radically different – this is the view of the “dualist”. Crucially, you can’t distinguish between these views with an experiment, because, for any scientific data, each of the views will interpret that data in their own terms.

If I wrote a book making controversial pronouncements on particle physics, it’d be rightly ridiculed, as I haven’t been trained in the relevant skills, haven’t read the literature, and haven’t had my views in this area subject to peer scrutiny. And yet there are many examples of scientists lacking any philosophical training publishing very poor books on philosophical topics without it impacting their credibility.

This might be sounding bitter. But I genuinely believe society would be deeply enriched by becoming more informed about philosophy. I have hope that we will one day move on from this “scientistic” period of history, and understand the crucial role both science and philosophy have to play in the noble project of finding out what reality is like.