Post-materialist cognitive science: Is it viable?

Reading | Cognitive Science

Matt Colborn, PhD | 2025-11-07

Back in the 1990s, I studied cognitive science in a Masters’ program. Cognitive science is the scientific study of the mind and its processes [1]. It’s composed of the subdisciplines of philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology. It’s also fascinating, and I was hooked right from the start. We’d been given a summer reading list before the course started, and the first book I read was Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained [2].

This book is in many ways a demolition of the dualistic model of consciousness suggested by the 17^th century philosopher René Descartes. But Consciousness Explained does much more than discredit seventeenth century metaphysics. Dennett, a philosopher, also attempts to debunk ‘qualia’ or subjective, phenomenological experience. Qualia is, according to the philosopher of mind John Searle, the central mystery of consciousness [3]. It is the essence of the ‘hard problem.’ But Dennett argued that ‘qualia’ does not exist as something ‘extra’ to brain function. This opens the door to a strongly materialist approach to consciousness.

In the book, Dennett articulates a central philosophical pillar of cognitive science. This is a rejection of ‘dualism’ or the ‘ghost in the machine’ and an embrace of functional, materialist, information-processing models of mind. Any understanding of the mind, according to Dennett, should be strictly empirical or third-person and ‘objective.’ Mind must be understood entirely as physical information processing that could in principle be reproduced in an AI or robot. Anything else is ‘giving up.’

For the remainder of this essay, I’m going to argue that this stance has become unviable. I’m also going to argue that the findings of cognitive science itself significantly undermine the strict materialism or physicalism of its founders. So, to briefly answer the essay title question, post-materialist cognitive science is not just viable, it is by now necessary.

One useful analogy is the early twentieth century shift from a classical physics understanding of the atom to quantum mechanics [4]. It is often forgotten that this conceptual transition was hard won, and that the founders of quantum theory began with attempts to formulate the structure of atoms in classical ways. It was only after these attempts failed that new and apparently commonsense-defying concepts were finally accepted. Participants like Schrödinger and Einstein especially resisted such innovations, but they led to the discovery, experimental confirmation and acceptance of such things as entanglement and non-locality. Cognitive science is now arguably in a similar position.

 

The power of modern cognitive science

Twenty-first century cognitive science is powerful. An emergent field is ‘4e’ cognitive science, which seeks to extend the field conceptually [5]. ‘4e’ stands for embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Classical cognitive science tended to focus on the functions of thoughts and cognition, underplaying the role of emotion and the body. 4e cognitive science tries to overcome this by understanding cognition in terms of brains embedded in the whole body, constantly interacting with the environment and with other conscious agents.

Artificial Intelligence, one subdiscipline of cognitive science, has become commercialised and widespread. Innovations like Large Language Models and diffusion models combined with big data at least superficially suggest that we may be on the path to Artificial General Intelligence. This success has even prompted heated debates about the possibility of Artificial Consciousness [6].

Modern neuroscience, another subdiscipline, is—according to a 2024 article in Nature—entering a new era. New technologies like Artificial Intelligence and sophisticated neuroimaging are “helping researchers to explore what sets the human brain apart from those of other species, and how its cognitive abilities have evolved” [7]. Neuroscientists are developing an unprecedented understanding of how brain function relates to many aspects of the human, including memory, emotion and personality.

 

The underlying logic of cognitive science

Despite this sophistication, the cognitive sciences have inherited a very specific theoretical foundation from the mid-twentieth century. This often goes unquestioned. It shapes many researchers’ basic assumptions about the nature of consciousness. One key feature remains the blanket rejection of ‘dualism.’ This was expressed in 2021 by the high-profile cognitive scientist and consciousness researcher Anil Seth.

In his book, Being You, Seth labels all alternatives to materialism “unscientific” [8]. The main problem, according to Seth, is that an alternative theory like panpsychism “doesn’t really explain anything” and “doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses….” and that such theories usher “the science of consciousness down an empirical dead end” [9]. So to thinkers like Seth, echoing Dennett, alternatives like dualism, panpsychism and idealism cannot be ‘scientific’ because they’re untestable. [Editor’s note: one must ask how testable materialism is.]

So what is the alternative favoured by cognitive science?

To understand this, we need to know a little history. Daniel Dennett completed his doctorate in Oxford in the 1960s. At this time, he studied under the philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Ryle was also a critic of Cartesian Dualism, or the ‘mind stuff’ idea. In 1949 he published a book called The Concept of Mind [10]. In this book, he claimed that ‘mind’ is essentially illusory. There is no substantial mind, Ryle claimed, only a myriad of biological functions. Observers mistake the working of these myriad functions for a substantial entity, but this is an illusion. The term ‘mind,’ according to Ryle, is like the term ‘university’: just as ‘university’ is a general label for a collection of many different things (buildings, students, lecturers, administrative procedures, etc.), so mind is just a collection of functions.

This is known as functionalism. Functions can be understood in terms of tools that are specialised to do certain jobs. A cutting tool can be made of metal, plastic or a laser beam. So the form of a knife might be quite various, but the function is the same. Functions can also be computational, as when a human or a pocket calculator adds two and two to get four.

Mind, then, is ‘nothing but’ a myriad of brain functions. This mass of functions was called the ‘society of mind’ by veteran AI researcher Marvin Minsky, a descriptor for what he called in 1985 the “vast, unknown mechanisms of the brain” [11]. And if the brain is a functional, computational “meat machine,” then this opens the door to its functions being reproduced artificially. So functionalism provides a theoretical justification for Artificial Intelligence [12].

 

Hallucinations and prediction machines

There is a great deal of confidence within cognitive science that a satisfactory, functional, physicalist conception of consciousness will eventually be found. Materialist philosopher Valerie Gray Hardcastle claimed back in the 1990s that consciousness “is completely nonmysterious” and that materialists “have total and absolute faith that science as it is construed today will someday explain” it [13].

Several theories try to reduce consciousness to brain function. A current front runner is Predictive Processing Theory. This conceives of the brain as a “prediction engine” or “experience machine” [14]. Subjective experience, in this theory, is a kind of ‘guess’ generated from our sensory inputs. Predictive Processing and related theories now provide a broad framework for understanding the brain. There have even been suggestions that they might help solve the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness [15].

Predictive Processing Theory is used by Anil Seth as the basis for a ‘hallucination’ theory of consciousness:

Predictive processing is a theory about the mechanisms by which brains accomplish perception (and cognition, and action). The controlled hallucination view, by contrast, is about how brain mechanisms explain phenomenological properties of conscious perception. [16]

Seth also claims that his view “dissolves” the hard problem of consciousness. Essentially, the ‘prediction engine’ of the brain shapes the way sensory experiences are perceived and experienced:

perceptual experience – [such as] the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them. [17]

Predictive Processing Theory has merits. It says some useful things about sensory consciousness and how experience is put together in the brain. Seth’s ‘hallucination’ theory also has some important and interesting things to say about how our perceptual experiences are shaped by higher-level brain functions. It allows us to understand waking experience as a sort of controlled dreaming, constrained by sensory input.

However, there are problems. The ‘hallucination’ theory of consciousness seems to me a twenty-first century version of epiphenomenalism. Epiphenomenalism assumes that consciousness is an ineffectual by-product of brain activity (Thomas Huxley, the nineteenth century inventor of epiphenomenalism, compared consciousness to the steam from a steam-whistle) [18]. ‘Hallucination’ theory, similarly, seems to give consciousness no causal role at all. It is ‘nothing but’ a side-effect of predictive activity in the brain.

Think too about what this theory implies. Human life is, after all, human consciousness. Nothing means anything without it. Our loves, hates, hopes, fear and joys; all exist within consciousness and nowhere else. Consciousness is also how we interact with the intersubjective world, and with each other. It acts as a reality-creating and reality-finding function for human beings and very likely other living things.

Our imaginations, a key but neglected part of consciousness, reshape this experienced world. These capacities have been termed ‘cosmogenic,’ or universe-making [19]. This seems to me a far more profound capacity than hallucination generation; indeed, a capacity that does not seem to me fully satisfactorily described by mechanical processes. Of course, brain function is a necessary condition, and Predictive Processing Theory no doubt helps our understanding of some of the specifics of the ‘cosmogenic’ process. But something important is missing.

Arguably, the ‘cosmogenic’ capacity does not seem like a mechanical process at all. It is more like a participatory process between the person and the ‘greater thou’ of the world. As neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has suggested, the kind of attention a person brings to the world, as an active subject, helps complete the world in which they participate [20]. This is not something a passive hallucination would allow.

And there are good reasons to think that attention cannot be reduced to a mechanical process either. Attention seems better understood as a holistic, brain-hemisphere mediated, whole-person capacity that is responsible for what McGilchrist calls the “whether at all” of existence [21].

There are still deeper problems. Researcher Patrizio Tressoldi has suggested that brain-function-only theories do not ‘dissolve’ the hard problem; they just evade it. This is because brain-based theories “…use mental terms such as emotions, perception, sensations, beliefs, expectations, etc., as aliases of their specific neural correlates that are more difficult to describe in one or few words” and that they “imply a sort of transmutation (i.e., miracle) of brain activity” to first-person experience” [22].

So neither Predictive Processing Theory nor the ‘hallucination’ theory of consciousness obviously ‘dissolves’ the hard problem. And they may, in fact, create a fundamental difficulty for any cognitive science that remains committed to materialism. This is because the ‘hallucination’ theory, taken to its logical conclusion, points to a possibly fatal weakness in one of materialism’s key elements: physical realism.

 

The end of physical realism

It’s long been accepted that we don’t experience reality directly. Instead, we experience reality as filtered through our senses. So we do not see a sunset or a rainbow. Instead, we experience something produced by the complex interaction of our visual systems with photons. So that is reality at one remove. The ‘hallucination’ theory of consciousness takes this a step further. As Seth himself states, “We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them.” This means, if the theory were true, that we only experience ‘reality,’ at best, at two removes.

However, such theories—being avowedly materialist—also rely on a philosophical stance known as physical realism. This means that they assume that we live in a ‘real world’ of physical objects that undergo physical processes. Biology and neuroscience are rooted in this assumption. They assume that the biochemistry, energetic processes, cells, organs and tissues of life are similarly ‘real.’ In his book, Seth states this explicitly:

My preferred philosophical position, and the default assumption of many neuroscientists, is physicalism. This is the idea that the universe is made of physical stuff, and that conscious states are either identical to, or somehow emerge from, particular arrangements of this physical stuff. [23]

But the ‘hallucination’ theory of consciousness creates insuperable difficulties. If our experienced reality is a hallucination, two removes from a ‘reality’ which can only ever be conjectural, this means that we never experience the ‘real world’ at all. This is because the experiential world is not, in these theories, even a direct perception of the alleged material world. It is only a kind of secondary, derived simulation of something that can never really be known. Our experiences may very well bear no resemblance to the ‘real world’ at all.

This fatally undermines the idea that science describes a real, material world that exists ‘out there,’ independent of consciousness. The issue here is that scientific practice relies upon experience. In fact, scientific observations and formal experiments are special, controlled forms of experience. They cannot be anything else. But if we have reasons to think that we can never access the ‘real world,’ then there seems to be no way of determining whether the observations and conclusions drawn from science have any bearing on the ‘real world’ at all.

This implies some kind of idealist position. Idealism suggests that the reality we experience is basically mental and not physical. At the very least, it seems to me, cognitive science, in embracing such theories, is forced to adopt something like the transcendental idealism of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant [24]. For Kant, objects in space and time are just ‘appearances.’ Space and time themselves are features of perception. This is a central argument of Kant’s 1781 opus, Critique of Pure Reason.

It also means that physicalism, as Seth defines it, is simply unviable. Any ‘stuff’ we might encounter is a feature of consciousness, not an element of objective reality. There seems no way around this problem.

These difficulties have been explored by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman in his 2019 book, The Case Against Reality [25]. In this book, Hoffman cites experiments that suggest that we tend to experience not reality as such, but that which helps us to survive. He links this in with theories of natural selection and evolution. He also looks at experiments in physics that seem to radically undermine the idea of physical realism. Instead, Hoffman suggests that we perceive “desktop representations” of reality. He calls this approach “conscious realism.” Hoffman is very explicit about the fundamental difficulties faced by physicalist theories of consciousness if his views are true.

It seems clear to me that these physicalist or materialist approaches, taken to their logical conclusion, undermine themselves. They might even strengthen arguments for the kind of Analytic Idealism advocated by Bernardo Kastrup [26]. Importantly, Kastrup argues that we do not experience objective reality at all, only what he calls a dashboard representation. He provides, in his lectures and writings, some very solid reasons for thinking this [27]. His arguments dovetail with Hoffman’s conception of a “desktop representation.”

Ultimately, if cognitive science wants a satisfactory metaphysical basis, then it will have to broaden its metaphysical horizons. My own view is that the author Peter Guy Jones is correct to point to some form of nondualism, derived from the Perennial Philosophy, as a solution to the apparently intractable dilemmas created by a dogmatic adherence to physicalism [28].

In his book, Jones demonstrates how various paradoxes of consciousness disappear if you accept that reality is a unity that goes beyond conceptual thought [28]. His is essentially an argument for a nondual, non-reductionist and mystical approach to reality and consciousness. Such important insights will be rejected by any cognitive science that continues to insist upon materialism. But they shouldn’t be.

 

Conclusion

In The Self and Its Brain, Karl Popper suggested that, in the history of science, materialism has often been forced to “transcend itself” [29]. He meant that very often, as scientific research progressed, initial, materialist concepts would have to be abandoned in favor of new ideas that transcended the materialism of the day. So Newton’s idea of gravity as attraction at a distance superseded Descartes’ purely mechanical universe. Faraday’s conception of electromagnetic fields introduced a new idea into physics that was also not obviously materialist. And in the twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory superseded classical mechanics.

I would like to finish with a little further reflection on the philosopher Valerie Gray Hardcastle’s statement that materialists “have total and absolute faith that science as it is construed today will someday explain” consciousness. I think that this ‘faith’ is unwarranted.

By “science as it is construed today,” Hardcastle is in part referring to what philosopher Thomas Nagel called the “materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature” [30]. This conception is widely held to explain everything in the universe. Consciousness, then, is presented as just another problem to be solved within that framework.

However, Nagel suggests that the Mind-Body problem [i.e. the hard problem of consciousness] is likely to be not just a local problem, “having to do with the relations between mind, brain and behaviour in living animal organisms.” It is instead likely to invade “our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history” [3]. Perhaps ironically, brain-based theories of consciousness, by invoking the idea of hallucination, and then by embracing the idea that we absolutely do not experience the ‘world as it is,’ are inadvertently confirming Nagel’s claim. This means, in turn, that science “as it is currently constituted” cannot possibly contain the wider ramifications of the mind-body problem. So materialism will have to once more transcend itself.

Post-materialist cognitive science is not merely viable. It is necessary.

 

References

[1] Cognitive Science (5 September 2025). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_science

[2] Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness explained. Allen Lane.

[3] Searle, J.R. (1990). The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta books.

[4] Helrich, C. (2021). The quantum theory―origins and ideas: A historical primer for physics students. Springer.

[5] Newen, A., Bruin, L. & Gallagher,S. (eds.) (2018). The Oxford handbook of 4E cognition. Oxford University Press.

[6] Colborn, M. (2025 September 8). Artificial Intelligence and consciousness: A guide for post-materialists. What Lies Beyond. https://whatliesbeyond.substack.com/p/artificial-intelligence-and-consciousness

[7] Editorial (2024). Human neuroscience is entering a new era — it mustn’t forget its human dimension. Nature, 630 (8017), 530–530. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02022-3

[8] Seth, A. (2021). Being you: A new science of consciousness. Faber & Faber.

[9] Seth, 2021.

[10] Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. University of Chicago Press.

[11] Minsky, M. (1985). The society of mind. Simon & Schuster, p. 30.

[12] Marcus, G. & Davis, E. (2020). Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence we can trust. Vintage.

[13] Quoted in Kuhn, R.L. (2024). A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications. Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 190, 28–169.

[14] Clark, A. (2024). The experience machine: How our minds predict and shape reality. Penguin.

[15] Lewis, R. (2023 28 November). The Predictive Brain and the ‘Hard Problem’ of Consciousness. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/finding-purpose/202311/the-predictive-brain-and-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness

[16] Seth, 2021.

[17] Seth, 2021.

[18] Robinson, W. (2023). Epiphenomenalism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/epiphenomenalism/

[19] Kelly, E.F., Kelly, E.W., Crabtree, A., Gauld, A., Grosso, M., Greyson, B. (2007). Irreducible mind: toward a psychology for the 21st century. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, chapter one, page 40.

[20] McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world (2 Vols). Perspectiva.

[21] McGilchrist, 2021, p. 204.

[22] Tressoldi, P. (2022, May 22). Miracles in the brain: how brain activity generates phenomenological first-person experiences according to some authors. https://doi.org/10.31231/osf.io/gj2wv

[23] Seth, 2021.

[24] Stang, N. F. (2024). Kant’s transcendental idealism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2024 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2024/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/

[25] Hoffman, D.D. (2019). The case against reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Allen Lane.

[26] Kastrup, B. (2024). Analytic idealism in a nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics. Essentia Books.

[27] Kastrup, B. (n.d.). Analytic idealism course. Essentia Foundation. Retrieved September 14, 2025, from https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/

[28] Jones, P.G. (2025). In pursuit of the inconceivable: An investigation of metaphysics and mysticism. Essentia Books.

[29] Popper, K. R., & Eccles, J. C. (1977). The self and its brain. Springer-Verlag.

[30] Nagel, T. (2012). Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford University Press.

[31] Nagel, 2012, p. 3.