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arXiv · 2606.00226

Consciousness, AI, and the Limits of Scientific Explanation

Bradley C. Love
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Abstract

Science is constitutively third-personal: its findings are in principle reproducible by any observer, independent of perspective, and answerable to measurement. This is the source of its power and also its limit when it comes to phenomena that are first-personal. While it is obvious that a science of the Meaning of Life is unattainable, researchers have not drawn the same conclusion for consciousness -- in its phenomenal dimension, the qualia of seeing red, of feeling pain, of being anything at all. I argue they should. The hard problem of consciousness is not a scientific problem awaiting better tools or a more ambitious theory, but a category error. The same structural problem applies to machine consciousness: neither attribution nor denial is scientifically adjudicable. Beyond subjective consciousness, aspects of cognition, such as deliberative thinking and understanding, also have an irreducibly first-personal, experiential dimension that places them outside the reach of third-person scientific explanation. I situate science within a broader ecology of understanding and argue that, while a unified framework addressing both the objective and the subjective may be unattainable, practical questions about consciousness, including in machines and nonhuman animals, can nonetheless be navigated.

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Bradley C. Love. 2026-05-29. Consciousness, AI, and the Limits of Scientific Explanation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00226

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