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Imagine you have a bowl full of little chunks of unknown material. You want to determine what sorts of materials are in the bowl so you decide to sample some and analyze it. You gather a sample from the bowl by placing a magnet in it and removing whatever sticks to it. Upon analysis you discover that everything in the sample is made of metal, and so conclude that all the material in the bowl was metal.

Do you see anything wrong with this scenario?

Obviously, the method used to create the sample was highly biased towards gathering magnetic metals. Any pieces of plastic, glass, fabric, wood, or any other non-magnetic material would not have have stuck to the magnet, so would not have been included in the sample. The choice of sampling mechanism basically defined the outcome.

I’m in the process of reading a book that gives an overview of research into the nature of our minds, sometimes referred to as the hard problem of consciousness. It discusses neuroscience, philosophy, and other ways of analyzing the problem. At first it seemed odd to include things other than neuroscience, but then I realized the error in not doing so.

Neuroscience works from the assumption that all mental activity can be explained through physical processes and nothing else. Unlike fields such as philosophy, it does not allow any sort of immaterial explanation — like other forms of biological science, it assumes that physical processes explain everything. As such, it is no more likely to discover an immaterial, transcendent aspect to consciousness than the magnetic probe is to gather glass beads. The choice of analytical tool defines the type of outcome.

Of course, this may be oversimplified. It’s possible that neuroscience could prove that some activity exists that can’t be explained. However, proving that a solution can’t exist is virtually impossible with experiments, even for fields such as physics. In fact, until the more fundamental sciences have no gaps, there’s no way to get to a final conclusion with neuroscience.

I’m just starting to study consciousness, but this is definitely one of the things that bears more thought. How much do our assumptions affect our investigations of the world? In general, most would say they have a big effect. So when approaching something so different, like human consciousness, maybe we should be especially wary of those preexisting assumptions.