A specter is haunting science - the specter of consciousness. Ignored, denied, explained away, the fact stubbornly remains that this central feature of existence sits in the heart of understanding, drawing all thought towards its existential gravity. Though the story's outline is obscured by the sheer breadth and scope of the subject, human thought is in fact converging on a central topic. Consciousness science is in its infancy, but in time it will swallow the whole of science, indeed the whole of human understanding. Once consciousness becomes integrated in our conceptual model of reality, humanity will have conquered itself, and the vista of the future shall blossom before mankind with paradigm shaking possibility. It will be the end of history, the end of humanity, and the end of the self as we know it. And it may happen sooner than we think. But, science as we know it has to change first, and radically so. To understand how this apocalyptic vision could possibly come to pass, we must understand first how we got to where we are.
The first important thing to understand is that modern science, at it's heart, is based on a willful ignorance of the conscious self. To the founders of modern science it was obvious that science as normally practiced couldn't solve the riddle of experience. The system and methodology of science was contrived to create the distinction of subjective and objective in the first place, for only by removing the observers "experience" of the world from the explanation of the world was "objectivity" possible. Philosophically this distinction reached its apotheosis in the dualism of Descartes, who radically declared that the world was made of two distinct substances that (somehow) worked in concert. One was matter, the world of extension, and the other was mind, the world of thought. Science dealt with the extended world and all its objectively measurable features. Thinkers like Locke introduced distinctions like "primary" (aka objective) and "secondary" (aka mental) qualities to further refine the dualistic metaphysics behind the modern scientific project. Meanwhile, perhaps most importantly, Newton provided the most powerful coherent vision of a predictable cosmos in the history of man. And so the world became as clockwork, an objective thing that ran on its own but behaved in regular enough ways as to allow for ever more refined conceptual modeling. "Laws" were "discovered" and the game of science appeared to be discovering these abstract mathematical truths which "bind" the world to their mathematical formalism. There were blind spots to this new modern view, Hume's puzzles about causation to this day give serious scientists pause, but, the success of science, that is, the success of seeing the world as insentient mechanism, generated cultural returns beyond any philosopher's wildest dreams. With the introduction of Darwinian evolution in the 19th century, it began to look like even life could be described as the activity of blind, law-bound mechanism. The strict distinction between mind and matter hadn't been removed, but, serious minded people began to wonder if their "thinking thing" was itself just another part of the clockwork, a cog in the machine. With science transforming the world as no force ever had before, humanity became inclined to take seriously the idea that they were "a machine," and that they lived in an indifferent, sterile universe of matter, devoid of all being and meaning. In many ways, modernity is the reaction to this slowly dawning existential realization. Here was the central paradox of post-scientific man, ever more triumphant in his control of the world, ever more able to clothe, feed and please himself with material wealth, but burdened with a new gnawing anxiety at the heart of his existence. Something beyond the cliche "death of God" or trite exhortations about a world without "meaning." Rather, an abyss of self in which man feared that he in fact was truly empty, a machine carried along by the gears and pulleys of a dead, insentient and arbitrary world. A fate worse than death, for in this world one was barely alive.
For most of the 20th century scientists simply stayed away from consciousness, suspecting it too hard, too perplexing, and too ephemeral a subject for serious empirical understanding. The mind became the province of psychology, a dubious discipline characterized by equal parts intuitive speculation, trial and error case study, and ideological agenda. Figures like Freud and Jung became household names, the first to develop a "science of the mind," but there's was a science divorced from the broader project of uniting the world in a single explanatory paradigm. And while it is a much disputed philosophic topic whether subjects like biology and chemistry can reduce down to physics, the success of physical reductionism seemed to imply that such a unifying picture of the world was indeed plausible, or at least worth attempting. As long as the mind remained separate that is. So psychology developed it's own vocabulary, theories and practices, a body of knowledge which up until recent history was entirely divorced from biological or physical science. The concepts that could link the general physical picture of reality with an understanding of mental activity remained distant and obscure. Though the brain, with its immense physical complexity, always pointed toward a mental theory rooted in a coherent picture of the world - that is to say a picture which incorporated mind and matter in a single system - filling out what such a theory entailed was far beyond the limits of what science could understand and test. Instead we got Oedipus complexes and castration anxiety.
Ignored by science, the problem lingered on in philosophy, though even there it became somewhat muted throughout most of the 20th Century. The prominence of Wittgensteinian thought convinced many that the issue was primarily one of linguistic, as opposed to ontological, confusion. Might it just be a trick of our language that convinced us there was a phenomenon here requiring special explanation. It was a novel approach. But, experience is always there, directly perceptible yet utterly mysterious. Linguistic tricks, however clever, could not explain away the act of being itself. The question of consciousness received it's first major intellectual revival with Thomas Nagel's now legendary article "What is it like to be a bat?" Here at last was a coherent articulation of exactly what the problem was and why no solution seemed imminent. According to Nagel, consciousness was the feature of reality that explains what it is like to be something in the world, and thus was inherently irreducible and subjective. Science, of course, is entirely in the business of reduction and objectivity. Nagel exposed a fundamental flaw in the quest for an entirely reductionist vision of the world. The mind it seemed, might be forever out of bounds, unexplainable and mysterious.
Over the decades that followed there were volleys and counter-volleys. Philosophers with dreams of reductionism made valiant efforts to deny Nagel's premises and offered reductionist models of their own. Daniel Dennett and Paul & Patiricia Churchland produced the most strident efforts to show that consciousness could be reduced after all, marching ahead with the steadfast certainty that their brand of materialism just had to be right. Others, like John Searle and Saul Kripke did their best to pour cold water on the materialists' hopes and the entire situation seemed to be at an impasse. Again, the scientists mostly stayed away. After all, so little was known about the basics of brain functioning that any attempt to theorize consciousness empirically would amount to little more than a stab in the dark.
It's not always what you say, it's how you say it that counts. The modern era of consciousness began with David Chalmers' lecture at the 1994 University of Arizona: "Toward a science of Consciousness" conference. Here Chalmers first introduced his now famous formulation of "the Hard problem" of consciousness and in so doing drew a clear line in the sand for philosophers and scientists as to how deep the conceptual problem of consciousness really was. The Hard problem was the problem of subjectivity itself. The "something it is like" quality of experience that is undoubtedly real, and yet, from the point of view of science, totally unpredictable and unexplainable. This nifty, catchy slogan became omnipresent in the philosophical literature, with materialists scrambling to write journal articles and books arguing against Chalmers' conceptual division between "hard" and "soft." It's been almost 20 years since the introduction of "the Hard Problem" and philosophy has changed immensely because of it. The powerfully simple articulation of the Hard problem was amplified by a series of highly inventive thought experiments - Chalmers' "philosophical zombies," Jackson's "Mary's Room," Searle's "Chinese Room" - and together they exploded open the intellectual landscape, forcing the entire philosophical establishment to take sides. Long derided metaphysical options again appeared on the menu. Once derided as an insane theory of the world, panpsychism reemerged as a serious ontological option. Dualism too saw a revival, not of the crude Cartesian variety perhaps, but a more rigorous "property dualism" that, when teased out, is comparable to a kind of monism. (The taxonomy of these various stances toward the mind-body problem became a specialty of Chalmers' philosophical writing.)
By the millennium the conceptual options available had been clearly delineated and there was little more philosophically to be said about the topic. Despite the very vocal views of Dennett and the Churchlands, the philosophic tenor had changed drastically; a few, like Colin McGinn, just threw up their hands in confusion, claiming the Hard problem pressed up against the very limits of human understanding. But most became open to a picture of the world that included consciousness as an irreducible feature, though teasing out the implications of this view proved murky, especially since the Hard problem didn't offer any theory of consciousness, it only articulated the problem that any theory thus far had failed to address. With philosophy tapped out, the particular paradoxes of consciousness exposed, it was time for empirical science to take its first fledging steps toward understanding the mystery of mysteries, the phenomenon of consciousness...
