Qualia and Consciousness: Why the Mind Is More Than the Brain

Matter, by definition, can be explained through material properties such as shape, quantity, size, and mass.

Science is material by nature. It is a research tool designed to obtain information about the material world. For this reason, when science attempts to describe the human being, it is forced into an extreme and fundamentally mistaken reduction, defining all human traits, including senses, impulses, and actions, as it would define those of a machine. Science treats the human being as a robot and is unable to recognize the concept of experience, known as qualia.

What Is Qualia?

Qualia is a term that describes any inner experience. It is not only the acquisition of physical information about the world, but the experience of that information itself, as we feel it through sight, hearing, touch, and other senses. Qualia is not a description of data in the brain, but a description of consciousness experiencing that data.

For this reason, science cannot define qualia. Since the world of phenomena includes only observable phenomena, science is unable to acknowledge the existence of an observer of those phenomena. A research robot could identify thirst only as a set of processes involving the intake and storage of liquids, but it could never understand the experience of being thirsty.

The Philosophical Zombie

The analytic philosopher David Chalmers proposed a thought experiment known as the philosophical zombie.

Imagine that we succeed in cloning a human being but remove consciousness from the clone. This person’s body would be complete in every respect. The brain would receive information from the material world through the senses and respond accordingly. In other words, the person would be a perfect biological robot. As a body required to survive, it would eat and drink, move and speak logically to fulfill its needs, and avoid danger. However, since it lacks consciousness that experiences reality, there would be no one home. This person would experience nothing and feel nothing.

Through this thought experiment, Chalmers sought to demonstrate dualism, meaning the existence of both body and soul, based on the fact that human beings possess consciousness that experiences qualia, something the body alone cannot explain.

If a human being were only matter, there should be no observer experiencing qualia. In a completely material reality, there could be only material data, information transfer, and processing, without any separate inner reality. This point is crucial. If consciousness were merely an illusion, then no one would be experiencing the illusion.

I Experience, Therefore I Exist

René Descartes famously stated, “I think, therefore I am.” However, this formulation should be corrected to: “I experience, therefore I am.”

A person does not need words or thoughts in order to experience sensory reality. One sees, feels, and senses even without thinking, just as a baby experiences hunger or the desire for a mother’s embrace long before it can think or speak in words.

In a reality of matter alone, there should be no observer in the brain. As in the philosophical zombie analogy, a human being should be nothing more than an emotionless machine. Physical impulses such as pain, hunger, and thirst would drive behavior like that of an insect, but without any inner experience.

Billions of neurons could still generate impulses, causes, and effects within the biological machine of the physical body, which must act to survive and avoid danger like a plant or insect. Yet none of this should produce qualia.

The Fact of Experience

And yet, here we are, experiencing experiences. There are countless qualia arising from a consciousness that experiences reality.

Our brain is not empty of an observer. Images are projected onto a screen in the brain, and science can explain this well. But someone is watching that screen. There is someone home. Someone who sees, hears, and feels pleasure, desire, and pain, not as data, but as lived experiences. These are qualia.

From this we learn that consciousness is not material.

This is not because science has not yet succeeded in explaining it in natural terms, but because science cannot even acknowledge its existence. This conclusion does not depend on the level of scientific progress. Science has already achieved sufficient explanations for sensory processes such as sight and hearing, yet it ignores the inner reality of an observer, which it cannot accommodate because it is not part of material reality.

Even if scientific research were to succeed in transmitting information directly into the human brain, producing complex electrical signals that create artificial images, sounds, pleasure, or pain, this would still not explain, even minimally, the consciousness that experiences that fabricated information.

Drugs, for example, can produce sensory experiences and emotional states by affecting neural information transfer, a chemical process no different in principle from seeing or hearing. Yet this says nothing about who experiences the sensations and emotions produced in the brain.

In this sense, the brain is like a screen onto which a movie is projected. Science may succeed in deciding which movie plays on the screen, but it will never explain who is watching the movie.

Materialist science denies the existence of an observer because materialism cannot accommodate a non material observer. Yet we know directly and undeniably that the observer exists within us. This reveals the presence of spirit within the machine.

Consciousness and the Soul

Our self, or consciousness, is a non material entity that exists within the physical body. We are, in essence, spiritual beings who experience material reality through our bodies and brains, like a driver inside a vehicle.

This is precisely the definition of a soul: a non material reality that exists and operates within the physical body of a human being.

The materialist is forced to deny one of two things, either materialism itself or conscious experience. Since no person can deny their own existence, a rational person cannot deny the existence of the soul.

The Practical Implications

This understanding has profound practical implications. It provides a rational foundation for core concepts such as the value of human life and human dignity. Recognizing that a person is distinct from matter, and experiences the world as spirit within a machine, grants each individual an intrinsic and unique sanctity that no material machine can ever possess.