One outcome in science today is the rise of panpsychism, the view that all life forms participate in consciousness to at least some minimal. Panpsychism attracts many because it allows consciousness to be real rather than illusory (as per physicalism) but it remains in the same g...

The brusque and decidedly no-nonsense Crick was in the event fated to meet his Waterloo when it came to the subject of consciousness, explains Hoffman. Crick had at first attempted to explain it somewhat airily as nothing but an “emergent” property which “naturally” arose when matter reac...

Scientists haven’t solved this still called “Hard Problem of Consciousness,” and a materialist solution is nowhere in sight. Not for lack of trying. Some, improving on Darwin, insist that chimpanzees really do think like people if you study them enough (no, they don’t). Others cl...

Both Hoffman and Crick were finally forced to conclude that all purely physicalist theories of consciousness had failed to provide illumination and that the state of consciousness could not be explained in neurological terms, a conclusion powerfully endorsed for more than three d...

The bottom line seems to be that we are not only ignorant but, alas, prostrate in our ignorance of the brain’s arcana. Theoretically, of course, there may yet emerge an as yet undiscovered materialist explanation for the brain and human consciousness. But to date we must ...

AI capable of thinking like a human would be a philosophical problem, to be sure, because it would mean both that intelligence can create itself and that it can be instantiated in a non-biological form.

However, such a development would not demonstrate tha...