"The seeming immateriality of consciousness has so far resisted all the tools of reductive science, and this is what has allowed an aura of magic to bloom around it. I suspect that the "problem of consciousness" has become a proxy for our own resistance to reductive explanation, which in turn must have something to do with our fear of mortality—that final unwished-for reduction of all that we are and all that we value in life to mere matter—to ashes or compost. Descartes called the immaterial half of his dualism a soul, and souls, after all, are indestructible. The hardness of the hard problem has given us a secular version of the immaterial, immortal soul.
The idea, or wish, that consciousness cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental nourishes theories like panpsychism and idealism—two versions of the concept that consciousness pervades the universe and is itself as fundamental as matter or energy, perhaps even more so.
Panpsychism, you'll recall, is the theory that everything—even a rock or a grain of sand—has some infinitesimal parcel of protoconsciousness, with these parcels combining, somehow, to create the sort of complex mental lives we experience.
In the other version, idealism, consciousness comprises a universal field that precedes matter; the function of brains is to tune in to this field, much as a radio picks up and plays signals floating in the electromagnetic field, bringing them into our awareness.
I'm guessing it's ideas like these that my lunch companion had in mind when he pejoratively deployed the word magic. I share his skepticism. Yet at the same time, I find it no more plausible that a small, wet, spongy chunk of animal flesh can wake up and become aware of not only itself but also the fact that it's aware of itself! This, too, feels like magic.
It argues for keeping an open mind."
— A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
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