{"id":191949,"date":"2024-06-27T06:28:46","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T11:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/the-prospects-for-a-scientific-understanding-of-consciousness"},"modified":"2024-06-27T06:28:46","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T11:28:46","slug":"the-prospects-for-a-scientific-understanding-of-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/06\/the-prospects-for-a-scientific-understanding-of-consciousness","title":{"rendered":"The prospects for a scientific understanding of consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-prospects-for-a-scientific-understanding-of-consciousness.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Michael Shermer has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/will-science-ever-solve-the-mysteries-of-consciousness-free-will-and-god\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">an article up at Scientific American<\/a> asking if science will ever understand consciousness, free will, or God.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems\u2014not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in principle, relating to how the concepts are conceived in language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>On consciousness in particular, <a href=\"https:\/\/selfawarepatterns.com\/2015\/11\/09\/why-i-think-we-will-eventually-have-a-scientific-understanding-of-consciousness\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I did a post a few years ago<\/a> which, on the face of it, seems to take the opposite position. However, in that post, I made clear that I wasn\u2019t talking about the hard problem of consciousness, which is what Shermer addresses in his article. Just to recap, the \u201chard problem of consciousness\u201d was a phrase originally coined by philosopher David Chalmers, although it expressed a sentiment that has troubled philosophers for centuries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Michael Shermer has an article up at Scientific American asking if science will ever understand consciousness, free will, or God. I contend that not only consciousness but also free will and God are mysterian problems\u2014not because we are not yet smart enough to solve them but because they can never be solved, not even in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191949"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191949\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}