Consciousness researcher Sharon Hewitt Rawlette offers,

If we want to explain why water is a liquid at room temperature, we can say it’s because of the strength of the hydrogen bonds between H2O molecules. The bonds are too weak to fix the molecules in place like in a solid, but strong enough to keep the molecules from spreading out as in a gas. This explanation works because there’s a conceptual connection between the weakness of the hydrogen bonds and the macroscopic properties of liquidity, such as the way a liquid takes the shape of its container.

A physical explanation of phenomenal consciousness would require the same kind of conceptual connection between phenomenal consciousness and some physical activity. There would have to be some kind of particle movement that clearly could not happen without conscious experience. But no such conceptual connection exists…

There’s an essential logical link missing between the kinds of processes investigated by physical science and the conscious experience that sometimes accompanies them. And this makes a physical explanation of consciousness impossible.

“Why Science Will Never Explain” Consciousness, July 31, 2024

What’s really interesting is that Psychology Today is comfortable entertaining this view. At one time, it was much more common for popular media aimed at people who are interested in ideas to take the view that science will shortly “explain” it all. That always meant: show that it is just another swing of the pendulum in a physics experiment…

Science has too often been a get-out-of-fail-free card for all kinds of conundrums, including those about which — at its best — it should have little to say.

If a physical explanation of consciousness is not possible (and that is what the many warring theories of consciousness surely suggest), what are we to make of claims that someday soon computers (inanimate objects) will be conscious like humans?

There certainly such a thing as unscientific credulity. But there is scientific credulity as well. And today, that may be a bigger problem.