Summary

Consciousness cannot be physical.

---

This claim is obviously controversial, as evidenced by the fact that pretty much no serious scientist believes it[1]. Nonetheless, I think it is an inevitable finding. I will present my reasoning.

You can be sure of your own consciousness. You cannot be sure of anyone else’s. For something to be “physical,” it ought to be equally verifiable, in principle, by anyone with the right tools. It should never be the case that there’s an asymmetry: I can be sure of X but you cannot. Imagine if gravity or the Higgs Boson were verifiable by some people, but in principle not by others.

In other words, these three things cannot be true at the same time:

1. I can be sure of my consciousness.
2. You cannot be sure of my consciousness.
3. My consciousness is physical (or fully described by physical processes).

This is why the argument “but science has conquered all other hard questions we’ve thrown at it; why not this one?” does not work here. No other “phenomenon” has this fundamental asymmetry. (Though as we shall see later, even calling it a “phenomenon” is already misleading.)

So which of the above three points is false? The most obvious candidate for attack is (1). That is why smart people say the darndest things:

Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen.  

– Michael Graziano, professor of neuroscience at Princeton.

If you find it too crazy to deny consciousness outright, you might try to find an indirect route: emergentism, epiphenomenalism, etc.

But centuries of philosophical debate have not resolved this, and so it’s pointless for me to take that route. Thinking amounts to very little in these parts. As best I can tell, there is only one way to discover the thing I’m trying to convey. Sit down and do the exercise laid out in the you can know that you’re conscious piece. Just look.

If your intellect takes control of the process – which is more or less inevitable unless you’ve done some meditation – it will find a thousand ways to convince you that there’s nothing very special going on.

But there is something very special indeed going on here. It’s just that it transcends this funny dream it’s having – the one it calls “physical reality” – and so we can’t express it with language, thoughts, or other constructs internal to the dream.

Instead, treat this as a riddle:

So close you can’t see it

So simple you can’t believe it

So deep you can’t fathom it

So good you can’t accept it

– Tibetan Buddhist saying

What is it? Careful: don’t use your words.

(At this point I should come clean and admit that you cannot really know that you’re conscious. All you can know is that consciousness IS.)

---

1. Except perhaps, again, for this guy:

   I’m not going to attempt to define consciousness, in a way that’s connected with the fact that I don’t believe it will become part of physics. … I think consciousness will remain a mystery. Yes, that’s what I tend to believe. I tend to think that the workings of the conscious brain will be elucidated to a large extent. Biologists and perhaps physicists will understand much better how the brain works. But why something that we call consciousness goes with those workings, I think that will remain mysterious. I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness.

    

   – Edward Witten, a physicist who colleagues casually call “head and shoulders above the rest” and “smarter than anyone else.”