Neuroscientist Erik Hoël offers some interesting observations about the failure of researchers to “explain” human consciousness (as some sort of mechanism that evolved in the human brain). Like he note recently at IAI.TV,
Although I cannot claim certainty, the fact that science is fundamentally incomplete is at least conceivable to me. This would mean that there are scientific facts which at first glance seem difficult to discover, but whose true answers remain closed to us for non-trivial reasons. (“Non-trivial” is important here – there are clearly many trivially closed facts for us, like counting every atom in the universe.) Non-trivial scientific incompleteness would be a different beast. It would be more like some scientific statements ending with a paradox, the scientific equivalent of “This sentence is a lie.”
Scientists generally avoid meta-scientific questions like that of scientific incompleteness. I understand why! This sounds too much like philosophy, which is dangerous (something I was told repeatedly during my PhD). Dark, deep waters. But of course, a very similar question has been asked in mathematics, and its answer is very famous in Gödel’s theorems (essentially, yes, mathematics is necessarily incomplete). Even if the “genre” of incompleteness proofs does not affect most working mathematicians, it is also not without importance: it arises like a threatening weed.
Here we must first be wary: gesturing to incompleteness in mathematics is just an analogy. The extent to which the analogy is valid is a matter of debate (or investigation). The different results of incompleteness in mathematics (some are better known than others) conceptualize mathematics as a formal system, an abstract machine. This machine requires defining elements such as symbols, grammar, a set of axioms and inference rules. Then you configure the machine to work and see if you can find any paradoxes in its operation.
“Consciousness, Gödel and the the incompleteness of science,» January 9, 2025
Although Hoel never actually says it, he seems to entertain the possibility that the human mind is something that science cannot explain. if by explain we want to say: Show that it is a material phenomenon like any other.
It is becoming more and more evident that human consciousness isn’t it a material phenomenon like any other; he has one foot in time and another in eternity. Efforts to maintain both feet over time have come to nothing and will likely continue to do so.
Hoël, the author of The world behind the world: Consciousness, free will and the limits of science (Simon & Schuster 2023), is a close collaborator of the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, which is also the origin of Integrated information theory (IIT), a panpsychist theory of consciousness defended by Christof Koch.
My own view is that orthodox science is slowly transforming from eliminative materialism to panpsychism. In other words, instead of “nothing is conscious”, we will increasingly hear “everything is conscious”.
This is unlikely to be true, but may be preferable as a starting assumption, given that it at least allows We be aware. We are not faced with the task of beginning our examination of reality by pretending that our ability to perceive reality is only an accidental part of a whole.
Learn more about Hoel:
In fact, incompleteness might necessarily creep into science because of its reliance on mathematics itself. That’s what Stephen Hawking thought. Although he is known for his triumphant quest for a theory of everything, Hawking concluded near the end of his life that such a theory was impossible. His reasoning? This science owed too much to mathematics, and that is why undecidability crept in – science inherited the paradoxes of mathematics. “Incompleteness of science,»
In fact, incompleteness might necessarily creep into science because of its reliance on mathematics itself. That’s what Stephen Hawking thought. Although he is known for his triumphant quest for a theory of everything, Hawking concluded near the end of his life that such a theory was impossible. His reasoning? This science owed too much to mathematics, and that is why undecidability crept in – science inherited the paradoxes of mathematics.
The problem with Hoel’s reasoning is that he writes as if he believes our universe is in principle closed. But we don’t know that. If this is not the case, not all paradoxes are inherited from mathematics. Some are the result of outside influences. THE immortal character of the human mind may be one of the proofs of these influences.