According to O'Leary we haven't made much progress and part of the reason is that those who are working on the problem are doing so within the philosophical straitjacket of metaphysical naturalism according to which any explanation that doesn't conform to materialist or physicalist assumptions is rejected a priori.
It could be, of course, that consciousness cannot be explained naturalistically, that it's something completely other than the physical brain matter with which it seems to be integrated in the human species.
Whether it is or isn't, some of the questions related to consciousness that philosophers and neuroscientists are addressing include the following: Does everything in the universe possess at least a spark of consciousness or is it limited only to living things, or only to animals, or only to humans? Is consciousness physical, i.e. reducible to brain chemistry? Is it "real" or is it an illusion generated by the brain? Is consciousness more like information than like matter, energy, or force?
O'Leary asserts:
We know almost nothing about human consciousness but naturalism must treat it as evolved from unconscious elements (material stuff). Much confusion is avoided by recognizing that that is a core assumption, not a discovery. Naturalist theories of consciousness currently proliferate with abandon because there is no basis for deciding among them. They are tossed, like hats, into a ring.She goes on to consider a sampling of these naturalistic theories, skewering their inadequacies, before turning to a fundamental problem of all naturalistic explanations, one that I wrote about a few days ago:
As double helix discoverer Francis Crick (1916–2004) famously announced in The Astonishing Hypothesis, “Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive.”If that's true, how can we trust that our brains are reliable guides to truth? Indeed, isn't Crick's statement self-refuting? If our brains didn't evolve to recognize scientific truth, why should we believe Crick's assertion to be true?
Similarly, literary critic Leon Wieseltier writes, “If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? … Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.”Wieseltier is right. There's something profoundly self-defeating in assurances that natural selection has evolved reason for survival and not for truth. In other words, if that's true there's no good reason to think that it is true because by its own testimony reason could just as easily deceive us as enlighten us.
This is why Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry said that, "[T]his debate [over the origin and nature of consciousness] is immensely frustrating. In fact, much of the ongoing conversation about consciousness is self-evidently absurd."
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that "Maybe an explanation of consciousness is forever beyond us, just as calculus is forever beyond the mentality of a chimpanzee."
Even so, the longer the explanation of consciousness as a product of our material brain continues to elude us the more it looks like there's something else involved in producing the phenomena of conscious experience - an immaterial mind or soul, perhaps.
This, though, is a possibility that those researchers wedded to a naturalistic worldview will never consider, but if the possibility is, in fact, true, their obstinate refusal to abandon what's turning out to be a heuristically sterile metaphysics will trap them in a frustrating and futile effort to espy a satisfactory explanation in one theory after another - an effort to find an explanation that doesn't exist.