Everyone recognizes that the organization of a brain can affect how its owner experiences and behaves in the world. We can begin to glimpse how the brain as a “mechanism” can be wired-up to produce behavior. It is not so easy to see how that gooey blob sealed in the skull creates the simulation of the outside world we call experience. It’s hard to imagine why there is consciousness at all in a purely material universe.

I think there are two reasons for this. First, because our understanding of the material world is grounded in the ideal of simplicity. (Perhaps if biology rather than physics had been the paradigm science the situation would be different.) As it is, the picture we look for is a causal account that proceeds from the subatomic level right through to the collective behavior of human bodies. Brain science, assisted by the metaphor of computation, has done a lot to fill in gaps of increasing complexity, but is still in infancy.

The other reason is more subtle, and has engendered endless bickering among philosophers ever since Descartes. The problem posed by consciousness is not a gap in our understanding of how behavior is produced but a gap between the concept of behavior and the concept of experience. You can observe what I do, for example, but you cannot in the same way observe what I feel. Your brain is simply wired up to your senses and not to mine. The closest we have come to bridging the gap is to monitor brain states correlated with reported feelings (and even to produce them experimentally by stimulating the brain). But a “brain state” is still a description from the outside, from a 3^rd-person point of view. It does not reveal what it’s like to be in that state from the subject’s point of view. The problem is to explain in objective terms how there comes to be such a thing as subjective experience. To explain scientifically how matter can mind.

There is no brief answer. But I believe the current definition of science stands in the way. For, the commitment of science to a 3^rd-person viewpoint excludes the subjective by definition. As a corollary, agency is excluded from nature, which is considered fundamentally passive and inert. Whole organisms are agents. But at the neuronal level, processes are considered from the biologist’s or chemist’s point of view and are not considered to have a point of view of their own. We should look in this intertidal zone for answers. In particular, the organism’s own internal logics and strategies (not just its “organization” from the scientist’s point of view) give rise to what it’s like to be that organism.

The problem of consciousness concerns meaning from divergent points of view—the meaning to the experiencing creature as opposed to the outside observer. This is obviously related to empathy and the challenge to take others’ experience seriously. So, it’s not just a technical puzzle for academics but a basic social and moral issue. It’s also a personal source of wonderment: to grasp the miracle of one’s own consciousness, the buzzing show of experience produced by the brain and body.