Neuroscientist Erik Hoel offers some interesting observations about the fact that researchers have not succeeded in “explaining” human consciousness (as a sort of mechanism that just happens to have evolved in the human brain). As he noted recently at IAI.TV,

While I can’t claim certainty, science being fundamentally incomplete is at least conceivable to me. It would mean that there are scientific facts that at first look tantalizingly discoverable, but then their true answers remain closed to us for non-trivial reasons. (“Non-trivial” is important here—there are clearly many facts trivially closed for us, like counting every atom in the universe.) Non-trivial scientific incompleteness would be a different beast. It’d be more like some statements within science end in paradox, the scientific equivalent of “This sentence is a lie.”

Scientists usually shy away from meta-scientific questions like that of scientific incompleteness. I understand why! It seems too much like philosophy, which is dangerous (something I was told during my PhD repeatedly). Dark and deep waters. But of course, a very similar question was famously asked in mathematics, and it has a very famous answer in Gödel’s theorems (essentially that yes, mathematics is necessarily incomplete). While the “genre” of incompleteness proofs doesn’t affect most working mathematicians, it also isn’t irrelevant—it crops up like an ominous weed.

Here we must initially be wary: gesturing to incompleteness in mathematics is merely an analogy. It is up for debate (or investigation) to what degree the analogy holds. The various incompleteness results in mathematics (some are more famous than others) conceptualize mathematics as a formal system, an abstract machine. This machine requires defining things like symbols, a grammar, a set of axioms, and inference rules—then you set the machine to run, and see if you can find within its working paradoxes.

“Consciousness, Gödel, and the incompleteness of science,” January 9, 2025

While Hoel never quite says it, he seems to be contemplating the possibility that the human mind is something that science cannot explain if by explain we mean: Show that it is a material phenomenon like any other.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that human consciousness isn’t a material phenomenon like any other; it has one foot in time and another in eternity. Efforts to jam both feet into time have gone nowhere and are likely to continue to do so.

Hoel, the author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science (Simon & Schuster 2023), is a close collaborator of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, who is also the originator of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a panpsychist theory of consciousness championed by Christof Koch.

My own view is that orthodox science is slowly morphing from eliminative materialism into panpsychism. That is, instead of “nothing is conscious,” we will increasingly hear that “everything is conscious.”

That’s not likely to be true but it may be preferable as a starting assumption, given that it at least allows us to be conscious. We do not face the task of beginning our examination of reality by pretending that our ability to perceive reality is simply an accidental piece of the whole.

More from Hoel:

In fact, incompleteness might necessarily creep into science due to its reliance on mathematics itself. This is what Stephen Hawking thought. While he’s known for his triumphal pursuit of a Theory of Everything, toward the end of his life Hawking concluded that such a theory was impossible. His reasoning? That science owed too much to mathematics, and therefore undecidability crept in—science inherited paradoxes from mathematics. “Incompleteness of science,”

In fact, incompleteness might necessarily creep into science due to its reliance on mathematics itself. This is what Stephen Hawking thought. While he’s known for his triumphal pursuit of a Theory of Everything, toward the end of his life Hawking concluded that such a theory was impossible. His reasoning? That science owed too much to mathematics, and therefore undecidability crept in—science inherited paradoxes from mathematics.

The trouble with Hoel’s reasoning is that he writes as if he believes that our universe is closed in principle. But we don’t know that. If it isn’t, not all paradoxes are inherited from mathematics. Some are the outcome of outside influences. The immortal character of the human mind may be one of the pieces of evidence for those influences.