Short answer: Not yet. Science has explained a lot about consciousness, but whether it can fully explain it depends on what you count as “full.”

What science explains well today
- Levels and states: why wake, sleep, dreaming, anesthesia, and coma differ; how to track “level” with brain dynamics (e.g., perturbation complexity index).
- Contents and access: neural mechanisms for perception, attention, working memory, and report; causal manipulations (TMS, stimulation) that add/remove specific experiences; decoding some perceptual contents from brain activity.
- Correlates and mechanisms: mapping neural correlates of consciousness and how recurrent, large‑scale networks support conscious access.

What remains hard
- Phenomenal character (qualia): why particular neural processes feel like something from the inside (“the hard problem”).
- Measurement without report: objective signatures of specific experiences that don’t rely on verbal reports.
- Substrate and scope: whether non‑biological systems (e.g., AI) or non‑human animals are conscious, and what the necessary and sufficient conditions are.
- Unity and self: how a unified, first‑person perspective and a sense of self arise.

Leading scientific theories (none yet decisive)
- Global Neuronal Workspace: consciousness when information is globally broadcast for flexible use.
- Integrated Information Theory: consciousness corresponds to maximally integrated causal structure.
- Higher‑Order Thought, Recurrent/Local Processing, Predictive Processing, Attention Schema, and others.
Large comparative tests have yielded mixed results; no consensus “winner.”

Will science fully explain it?
- If by “full” you mean a theory that predicts and controls when, what, and to whom experience occurs—and that unifies clinical, developmental, and comparative data—many scientists think this is achievable.
- If “full” requires dissolving the intuition of an explanatory gap (why this physical process feels like this), opinions diverge: physicalists expect eventual closure; others think there’s an in‑principle limit. Some (illusionism, the “meta‑problem”) argue the feeling of a gap itself can be scientifically explained.

Pragmatic outlook
- Expect steady progress on mechanisms, measures, and applications (medicine, disorders of consciousness, anesthesia, brain–computer interfaces).
- Whether that counts as “fully explained” is partly a philosophical choice about what an explanation must do.

If you’d like, I can compare two specific theories, outline current experimental tests, or discuss implications for AI.
