The unending quest to explain consciousness
The closest we will ever come to describing consciousness is simply describing the correlates of consciousness. The &quot;ultimate cause&quot; of it will forever be a mystery, behind the veil.<p>Consciousness appears to exist outside of the physical world, in that we can describe a physical process entirely without invoking consciousness. Because of this, consciousness is beyond the scientific method and our fundamental understanding <i>in principle</i>, not just in practice.<p>This is why it is called the &quot;hard problem&quot; of consciousness. In principle, there is no framework of deduction or reasoning by which we can explain the emergence of qualia.<p>It is beyond us.