Of course, scientists are used to dealing with things that cannot be seen. The electrons, for example, are too small to be seen. But scientists assume unobservable entities to clarify what we observe, such as lightning or steam paths in cloud chambers. But in the unique state of consciousness, the thing to explain cannot be noticed. We know that consciousness does not exist through experiences but rather through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.
How can science explain that? When we deal with observational data, we can conduct experiments to test whether what we observe matches what the theory expects, but when we deal with awareness data that cannot be observed, this methodology will collapse. The best that scientists can do is to link experiments that cannot be observed. By observable processes, by scanning people's brains and relying on their reports regarding their own conscious experiences.
In this way, we can demonstrate, for example, that the hidden feeling of hunger is associated with visible activity in the hypothalamus in the brain. But the accumulation of these relationships does not amount to consciousness theory, what we want in the end is to explain why conscious experiences relate to brain activity. Why does this activity in the hypothalamus come with a feeling of hunger?
Explanation of philosophy to non-philosophers and a brief overview of everything
A physical world is muzzled
Before “Galileo Galilee” scientists believed that the material world was full of qualities such as colors and scents, but Galileo wanted a purely quantitative science of the material world and therefore he suggested that these characteristics were not actually in the material world but in consciousness, which meant that he was outside the scope of science.
This worldview constitutes the background of science to this day, and as long as we work in its realm, the best we can do is to establish reciprocal relationships between the quantum brain processes that we see and the qualitative experiences that we cannot perform without any means of explaining the causes of their synergy.
The mind
I think there is a way forward, an approach rooted in work since the 1920s by philosopher Bertrand Russell and scientist Arthur Eddington, and their starting point was that physical sciences really didn't tell us what the issue was.
This may sound strange, but it turns out that physics is limited to telling us the behavior of matter. For example, matter contains mass and charge, and it is completely behavior-attractive, repulsive, and acceleration-resistant. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers love to call "the intrinsic nature of matter", and how matter is itself.
So it turns out that there is a huge gap in our scientific view of the world, because physics makes us fall into the dark completely about what really matters. Russell and Eddington's suggestion was to bridge that gap with awareness.
