Short answer: We don’t know yet. Science has explained many mechanisms that correlate with and support conscious states, and it may be able to explain consciousness in ways that satisfy most explanatory and predictive demands. But there is an enduring conceptual challenge—the “hard problem” of why and how physical processes produce subjective experience—that many philosophers and some scientists think may not be fully captured by current scientific methods. Whether that’s a temporary gap or a principled limit is an open, disputed question.

Key points to understand the debate

- Two kinds of questions
  - The “easy” problems (scientists’ domain): Which brain mechanisms correlate with wakefulness, attention, reportability, perception, integration of information, etc.? These are empirically tractable and have seen steady progress (neuroimaging, lesions, stimulation, computational models).
  - The “hard” problem (philosophy’s label): Why do some physical processes feel like something from the inside—why is there subjective qualitative experience (qualia)? Explaining function and mechanism doesn’t automatically explain why there is something it is like to be the system.

- Leading scientific frameworks
  - Global Neuronal Workspace / higher-order theories: focus on broadcast, reportability, and higher-level representations.
  - Integrated Information Theory (IIT): proposes a measure of information integration (Phi) and links it to consciousness.
  - Predictive processing / Bayesian brain: sees consciousness as arising from hierarchical prediction and error signaling.
  - Many other computational and mechanistic approaches aim to map function to experience and to build testable predictions.

- Why this is hard for science (conceptual and methodological obstacles)
  - First‑person vs third‑person data: subjective experience is private; science traditionally uses public observers and objective measures. Scientists use reports and behavior as proxies, but those may miss something intrinsic.
  - Explanatory gap/phenomenal concepts: Even a complete physical description might leave an intuition that something is left unexplained because our phenomenal concepts don’t map neatly onto physical descriptions.
  - Multiple philosophical positions: physicalism (consciousness is physical or supervenes on the physical), dualism (consciousness non-physical), panpsychism (consciousness ubiquitous at some micro-level). These imply different expectations for what a scientific explanation would look like.
  - Measurement and operationalization: deciding which observable counts as the “same” conscious state across species, machines, or altered brains is hard.

- Empirical reasons for optimism
  - Strong and growing neural correlates of conscious states; causal manipulations (TMS, optogenetics) can turn conscious contents on/off or change them.
  - Predictive and mechanistic models are increasingly precise and testable.
  - Clinical and technological advances (disorders of consciousness, brain‑machine decoding) show practical power.

- Reasons for skepticism
  - No consensus theory that closes the explanatory gap.
  - Some philosophers argue that even a perfect science of function would leave the question of why experience exists unanswered.
  - The debate partly hinges on conceptual analysis, not just on new data.

What “fully explain” could mean in practice
- Provide a detailed mechanistic account that allows prediction, manipulation, and reliable mapping between brain states and reported experiences (this is likely achievable).
- Reduce subjective qualities to objective terms in a way that eliminates the intuition that anything remains mysterious (this is the contested target).
- Or show that subjective reports themselves are the relevant scientific explananda and there is no deeper “extra” to demand—this is Dennett’s sort of strategy.

Conclusion
Science can and has explained many aspects of consciousness and will continue to extend that explanatory reach. Whether science can “fully” explain subjective experience in the sense of dissolving the explanatory gap once and for all is an open philosophical and empirical question. Progress in neuroscience, cognitive science, and perhaps new conceptual tools could narrow or close the gap; alternatively, the gap might be resolved only by changing our philosophical assumptions about what counts as an explanation.

If you want, I can:
- Summarize the main theories and their predictions in more detail,
- Recommend accessible books and papers (e.g., Chalmers, Dennett, Tononi, Dehaene, Nagel),
- Discuss implications for AI and machine consciousness. Which would you prefer?
