Scientific materialism isn’t going to cut it.

That night, Koch lay awake in bed, wondering why any brain state should feel like anything. How did one bridge the gap between physical neurons and mental feelings? “I began to see that there’s no way to squeeze a phenomenon like consciousness out of some ions sloshing around in a brain,” he told me. This didn’t mean the search for neural correlates should be abandoned. “Whether you believe in materialism or panpsychism or whatever, we can agree that there are physical mechanisms in the brain that correlate with consciousness. But finding those mechanisms is never going to explain how consciousness arises.” p. xxi A World Appears by Michael Pollan

When it comes to the concept and experience of “consciousness,” the linear, reductive methods of science aren’t going to cut it. There is something more mysterious going on than can be explained by physical materialism. What is that mysterious something more?