Although much work has been done, science has no explanation of what consciousness is or what could give rise to it. All the neuroscience, psychology and information technology that can be done gets us no nearer to providing one. The best we can do is say that consciousness is seen to be associated with brains and correlated with brain states but that is not an explanation. Neither does it tell us whether brains are necessary and sufficient for consciousness or whether other substrates are possible.
David Chalmers describes the question of consciousness as the “hard problem” since even neuroscience is “easy” in comparison. Others, such as Joseph Levine, would say that, not only is it a hard problem but that it is an impossible one for us. There is an unbridgeable chasm, an explanatory gap, between what we can know about the brain ( a physical object ) and what we can know about the nature of conscious experience (a non-physical phenomenon) affirming the inadequacy of physicalism to explain what we observe.
This is a good thing, as we shall see when we look at the implications of materialism.
The following videos go into more detail about the problem of consciousness and why it is “hard” and a challenge to the belief that the only thing that is in the Universe is material. The contributors have different views on the implications of this but they agree that it implies that there is more to the Universe than material or, at least, material as we know it.
The first video gives a short overview of the issues involved while in the second video, David Chalmers gives a more detailed and prosaic description.
Conscious experience refutes physicalism
Ian Ravenscroft in his book [1] expresses his belief that phenomenal consciousness is a physical event of the brain but admits that there is no way to prove that and there are reasons to believe that is not the case:
“Phenomenal consciousness does not, in my view, give us grounds for abandoning physicalism: there is little reason to doubt that episodes of phenomenal consciousness are physical events in the brain. However I find the arguments offered by Levine to support the existence of an explanatory gap worrying and I follow Ned Block in thinking that, at present, nobody has come anywhere near bridging the gap [2]. We have nothing that even remotely looks like an account of how the brain gives rise to phenomenal consciousness, nor do we have many proposals about where we should begin to look for such an account”
The following video presents the case against the assumption of physicalism.
Other refutations of physicalism can be found, for instance here or here.
[1] Ian Ravenscroft,”Philosophy of mind, a beginner's guide”, Oxford University Press, 2005,ISBN 978 0-19-925254-1