Science can explain a lot about consciousness, but whether it can *fully* explain it depends on what you mean by “fully.”

**What science is already good at explaining:**
- Which brain systems are involved in wakefulness, attention, perception, memory, self-awareness, and emotion.
- How changes in the brain alter conscious experience, as in anesthesia, sleep, coma, psychedelics, brain injury, or neurological disorders.
- The “neural correlates of consciousness”: patterns of brain activity reliably associated with particular experiences.
- Functional aspects: how information is integrated, reported, used for decision-making, and tied to behavior.

**The harder question:**
Science can study the mechanisms behind conscious states, but many philosophers argue there remains a “hard problem”: why should physical brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why is pain painful, red experienced as red, or thought accompanied by subjective awareness?

There are several views:

- **Physicalism:** Consciousness is ultimately a physical process, and science can in principle explain it fully.
- **Illusionism:** Our sense of having mysterious inner “qualia” is itself a cognitive construct that science can explain.
- **Dualism:** Consciousness involves something non-physical, so science may never fully capture it.
- **Panpsychism or related views:** Consciousness may be a basic feature of reality, not reducible to ordinary brain mechanisms.

My balanced answer: **science will likely explain consciousness more and more in terms of brain mechanisms, cognition, and behavior. But whether that counts as a complete explanation of subjective experience is still unresolved.** It may turn out that the “hard problem” dissolves with better neuroscience, or it may reveal a genuine limit in our current scientific concepts.
