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[Skakos]

Self-awareness is defined as being aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors. Neuroscientists have believed that three brain regions are critical for self-awareness: the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the medial prefrontal cortex. However, a research team led by the University of Iowa has challenged this theory by showing that self-awareness is more a product of a diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain -- including other regions -- rather than confined to specific areas. The conclusions came from a rare opportunity to study a person (denoted as Patient ‘R') with extensive brain damage to the three regions believed critical for self-awareness [source: esciencenews.com/articles/2012/08/22/se ... ly.thought, foxnews.com/health/2012/08/23/brain-dam ... awareness/].

This is another blow to materialists thinking that consciousness is located in a specific sections of the brain…

As Near Death Experiences, more and more evidence are added to the arsenal of those who believe that consciousness could be the thing required for modern science to perform a massive paradigm shift and start thinking more spiritually, as it did once upon a time ago…

[Consciousness and the End of Materialism: harmonia-philosophica.blogspot.gr/2010/ ... nd-of.html]

[Gene16180]

Yes, I recall reading about patient R, an interesting article. However, I think this post denotes a very old equation concerning a fallacy of human thought :

No explanation = immaterial/supernatural/mystical etc.

Our ancestors were once hopelessly ignorant to the causes of illness, natural disasters and the rest, so they explained it in terms of the supernatural and the religious. How is what you’re doing any different? Neuroscience is just getting started and already you’re announcing where it’s going to end. Btw, saying that self-awareness is a product of diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain is not a blow to materialism. Listen, I study neuroscience and I would be the first to tell you want a mystery conciseness really is, irrespective of patient R. But in my opinion, the absolute worst thing we can do is to stand at the dawn of neuroscience and announce that understanding consciousness in natural terms is a hopeless endeavor and that we’re giving up. Had this style of thinking been universal we’d still be living in caves.

Secondly, I don’t think NDEs prove very much other then there’s a lot about the brain we still don’t understand. I do believe the phenomenology of it is very real, there are naturalistic theories being proposed for how it happens and in fact these experiences can be induced through drugs, extreme G-force and other perturbations of the central nervous system. They cannot, however, be used to cash out the claims of dualism and its brethren.

Finally, something tells me this is not about honest and unbiased skepticism, after all, most people are perfectly fine with material explanations of stars, malaria, the behavior of other animals, etc. Its only when we get to humans that material explanations become so controversial. I think people have a lot of spiritual currency invested in the existence of an immaterial realm and thus oppose materialistic science on emotional grounds, irrespective of the evidence. Tell me honestly, if patient R had exhibited the loss of self-awareness as predicted by the damaged neuroanatomy, would you have really reconsidered your position? To me life is fascinating, beautiful and to be valued even if we are nothing more than temporary constellations of molecules – it shouldn’t matter whether we have something called a “soul”. I think it is a dangerous folly to make the most important things in life contingent upon the unsubstantiated truth claims of the past.

[Skakos]

The first story I post indicates that what most people think - that specific areas of the brain are related to consciousness - is not true. And it does prove something: that consciousness is not somewhere specific. Consciousness seems to be related to something which transends the whole brain. NDEs on the other hand prove also that the brain is not all there is - even if it does not work at all we continue to be conscious.

[Janus D Strange]

The first story I post indicates that what most people think - that specific areas of the brain are related to consciousness - is not true. And it does prove something: that consciousness is not somewhere specific. Consciousness seems to be related to something which transends the whole brain. NDEs on the other hand prove also that the brain is not all there is - even if it does not work at all we continue to be conscious.

I think the problem with the idea that this research finding 'disproves' materialism, is that just because in the light of it we may no longer be able to think of consciousness as being material in the way we did previously, thinking about it as being material in some other way is not precluded.

On the other hand I am skeptical of the plausibility of claims, such as the one made by David Chalmers, that despite the difficulty of knowing what something that you cannot directly observe IS, he is nevertheless confident that we will, in the not too distant future have a plausible theory of consciousness. The problem, for me, is the seeming impossibility of giving a causal account of how something non-physical can interact with something physical. It does not seem possible to give an adequate account of consciousness (subjective experience) in physical ( causal) terms. And even if we were able to do this, we could never verify or falsify the theory because consciousness is not an empirical object.

Does this mean it is 'nothing'? Some argue that it does. But what do we mean by 'nothing'? Are not our concepts of 'something' and 'nothing' formed in the context of our empirical experience and hence reliably applicable only to the latter?

I think NDE's cannot prove or disprove anything, firstly because they are anecdotal and secondly because we might be mistaken about there being no activity in the brain at the time. Even if I had such an experience and it could be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was no brain activity when I had the experience, I might still doubt the veracity of my temporal memory, i.e. the traumatic nature of my experience might have caused me to imagine that some previous dream or memory had occurred during that time (that I was 'dead').

Note I am not making any statement of what it would be plausible, or what one ought, to believe in such a situation. The plausibility of or desirability of entertaining particular beliefs is always a matter for the individual.

[Gene16180]

The first story I post indicates that what most people think - that specific areas of the brain are related to consciousness - is not true. And it does prove something: that consciousness is not somewhere specific. Consciousness seems to be related to something which transends the whole brain. NDEs on the other hand prove also that the brain is not all there is - even if it does not work at all we continue to be conscious.

No, all it proves is that one theory concerning the neuroanatomy of self-awareness is either incorrect or incomplete. Many more are sure to disproven as our knowledge of the brain increases. NDEs, I’m sorry to say, won’t get you very far either. Clearly these people’s brains were not destroyed since they lived to tell the story, also please keep in mind what the N stands for. Secondly, as Janus D Strange pointed out, there is no evidence that these experiences occurred while the brain was shut down since temporal perception in such a state is not reliable. I think NDEs are only appealing to those who already know what they want to find. But back to my original point, are you really suggesting that neuroscience, having only begun to understand the brain, should resign and hand the problem over to whatever brand of religion or spirituality you seem to be espousing?

[Quotidian]

I think there is a very deep, yet extremely simple, way of coming to grips with all of these questions. It is that the act of understanding is obviously a function of the very consciousness whose nature these various theories is trying to explain. Therefore such 'explanations' cannot possibly help but beg the question. They must always be circular, because what they are examining is the same as what is doing the examining.

Now, remember, what does 'beg the question' mean (because a lot of people use that term incorrectly). It means 'assuming what you set out to prove'. So it seems to me that any 'theory of consciousness' is the product of the very phenomenon that it seeks to explain. It is not as if we can say: 'OK, let's stand right outside consciousness, put consciousness to one side altogether, and then see how it looks'. We must always approach it on the basis of reason, of seeking explanation, and so on, all of which is a major part of what we are trying to understand. So in the case of 'understanding consciousness' we are not different from what we seek to know. And that puts the question in an altogether different category from (for instance) biology or astronomy.

There's another way of looking at this. Say you do an MRI scan of a brain and detect a pattern of neural activities. Say the subject of the scan is looking at an image of a fire truck.

Could you say that the neural pattern that has been captured on the film was 'a fire truck'? Well, obviously not. The neural pattern is, in this case, a collection of dots on a film. It is not really a fire truck.

Could you say that the neural pattern represents a fire truck? Consider what it takes to 'represent' something. Normally, I can 'represent' a fire truck by drawing a picture of it, or even writing down the words: FIRE TRUCK. Anyone who can read English will know what that means and will be able to summon up the image of a fire truck, or identify the picture of it. So far, so good.

But does a pattern of neural activity, also constitute 'a representation'? Because if it does, it is no different, in principle, to the verbal representation, 'Fire Truck'.

All it is, is a pattern, which you, the observer, as equating with a 'fire truck'. You are equating those neural events with the image of the target, in this case, a fire truck.

But whether those neural activities really represent a fire truck in reality, I don't think we can ever know. It is not as if you can really re-construct what the 'experience of seeing the fire-truck' consisted of, on the basis of neural patterns. You can infer what the experience was, but that is no different, as I say, from reading the words. You are inferring what is there, on the basis of a symbolic representation. Meanwhile, the subject might have been (for instance) a fireman, in which case the image might have many connotations, which are not 'represented' in your picture of the fire truck. And, unlike with a magnetic drive, we can't even identify which 'bits' are associated with which parts of the image. All we really know is, there is the picture, and here is an MRI scan. We still don't really know anything about how these are related.

So, I think there is a deep confusion at work in this attempt to 'understand how the brain works'. It is based on a particular paradigm, that of representative realism. We assume that the mind (or the brain) forms an image of the world, in something like the way a computer stores information. But, if this is true, then our picture of this scenario, is also a representation - a picture of a picture, if you like.

I don't know if I have explained that very well, but it is an idea I am going to keep working on.

Had this style of thinking been universal we’d still be living in caves.

I don't think that is true at all. Certainly the neurosciences are important fields of study in their own right. I have had friends whose lives have been saved by neuroscience, and I would never deprecate that. But that doesn't mean that I think neuroscience ought to be regarded as 'a theory of human nature' or that through scientific analysis of how the brain works, we will necessarily advance morally or philosophically.

Its only when we get to humans that material explanations become so controversial. I think people have a lot of spiritual currency invested in the existence of an immaterial realm and thus oppose materialistic science on emotional grounds, irrespective of the evidence.

That might be because in this context, 'material explanations' are bad ideas, falsely applied. It might be, for instance, that they are driven by anti-religious ideologies. Leaving aside spirituality and the supernatural, the realm of ideas is 'an immaterial realm', within which materialist philosophy plays a small part.

[A Poster He or I]

The idea that a distributed or non-localized consciousness necessarily belies materialism is pretty obsolete. There have been materialist models of non-localized consciousness since neurophysicist Karl Pribram's theories from the 1950s. Modern-day materialism embraces the paradigm of Emergence to explain how consciousness may arise from material interaction of neurons, such consciousness being non-local by necessity.

Check out the first 17 or 18 minutes of this video to understand one example of such theorizing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o

I would also recommend Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe as an intro to Pribram's work and its similarity to holographic theory in quantum physics. The book even speculates pretty responsibly on materialist causation for spiritual and paranormal phenomena. And if you add the work of Demasio and the Churchlands, the statement that materialist philosophy plays a small part in consciousness theory begins to sound like defensive denial.

[Janus D Strange]

Quotidian wrote: "But whether those neural activities really represent a fire truck in reality, I don't think we can ever know."

Firstly, let me say I agree with almost everything you wrote in this post.

Thinkers of a materialist bent, seem to me incredibly obtuse or incredibly stubborn, I'm not sure which. I have a materialist friend who told me that a gene which predisposes people to religious belief had been discovered. He thought the gene must bring about a certain disposition in the people who have it such that they need something to believe in, and feel insecure without such certainty. Now this person clings so adamantly to their materialist, logical positivist philosophy that I jokingly said, "You should get yourself tested for this gene, I think you might have it". Well,he just laughed it off without apparently an inkling of the point I was trying to make. Talk about self-aware!

Anyway, I just wanted to comment on the above quote. I have no doubt that an actual physical configuration of neurons, a neural pattern, would be present when anyone represents a fire truck. But it could not be considered to be a representation because it would not itself resemble a fire truck. And I find it difficult to believe that given the different experiences that have gone to make up each individual's personality and its equally individually evolved neural correlate, that the neural configuration present in any two brains when they are representing a fire truck, would be even similar or distinguishable, in any systematic way, in their physical stucture from the configuration present during the representation of a table or chair or whatever.

If this is right it would be a 'language' that no-one, even in principle, could ever learn to read.

[Quotidian]

Thanks, and welcome to the forum!

I have no doubt that an actual physical configuration of neurons, a neural pattern, would be present when anyone represents a fire truck.

The thing is, though, that the brain also demonstrates considerable ability to reconfigure itself. That is part of the thrust of the article linked to in the OP. But I have read that in the event of brain damage, the part of the brain usually associated with one type of function, will spontaneously start serving another function. So it is not as if there is any kind of 1:1 relationship between 'type of information' and 'area of brain', or anything of the kind.

I have a materialist friend who told me that a gene which predisposes people to religious belief had been discovered.

The difficulty is, there is still quite a bit of controversy over speciation, which is what the Origin set out to explain in the first place. So maybe your materialist friend has a 'gene for wishful thinking'.

Modern-day materialism embraces the paradigm of Emergence

I don't think emergence is 'a paradigm'. It's just an ad hoc which enables materialism to continuously change its definition in such a way that it is able to explain anything new that comes along. If 'matter' itself is a holographic projection or an aspect of subjective experience, then why bother calling it 'matter' and the theories based on it 'materialism'?

[Janus D Strange]

Thanks, and welcome to the forum!

Thanks, looks like it should be fun.

"The thing is, though, that the brain also demonstrates considerable ability to reconfigure itself. That is part of the thrust of the article linked to in the OP. But I have read that in the event of brain damage, the part of the brain usually associated with one type of function, will spontaneously start serving another function. So it is not as if there is any kind of 1:1 relationship between 'type of information' and 'area of brain', or anything of the kind. "

I once asked the same friend if, given that we accept that there is a neural pattern for beliefs, whether he thought it would be plausible that it might one day be possible for neuroscientists to distinguish between a true belief and a false one based solely on their physical configurations. A truly physical theory of truth!

The difficulty is, there is still quite a bit of controversy over speciation, which is what the Origin set out to explain in the first place. So maybe your materialist friend has a 'gene for wishful thinking'.

A sub-routine of the religion gene perhaps...?

I don't think emergence is 'a paradigm'. It's just an ad hoc which enables materialism to continuously change its definition in such a way that it is able to explain anything new that comes along. If 'matter' itself is a holographic projection or an aspect of subjective experience, then why bother calling it 'matter' and the theories based on it 'materialism'?

In all my discussions, face to face and online, with people claiming emergence as an explanation for consciousness, free will and so on, and in reading Dennett's book Freedom Evolves (which I found almost unreadable), I have yet to come across any clear notion of how it could work to do what they claim it does. As far as I'm concerned it's an intellectual cop-out they trot out ad nauseum in order to make substantialist claims, not unlike in form, if not content, to those made by religion, but no clear explication is ever given.

[Syamsu]

Our ancestors were once hopelessly ignorant to the causes of illness, natural disasters and the rest, so they explained it in terms of the supernatural and the religious. How is what you’re doing any different? Neuroscience is just getting started and already you’re announcing where it’s going to end. Btw, saying that self-awareness is a product of diffuse patchwork of pathways in the brain is not a blow to materialism. Listen, I study neuroscience and I would be the first to tell you want a mystery conciseness really is, irrespective of patient R. But in my opinion, the absolute worst thing we can do is to stand at the dawn of neuroscience and announce that understanding consciousness in natural terms is a hopeless endeavor and that we’re giving up. Had this style of thinking been universal we’d still be living in caves.

I have seen your writings before, and you don't actually support science at all. What you propose actually is to prejudicially describe consciousness in terms of force, and to willfully ignore all evidence of freedom.

When we put explanations of consicousness in terms of force side by side with explanations in terms of freedom, then it is quite immediately clear that the explanations in terms of freedom beat the pants of any explanation in terms of force for any standard of scientific merit you can think of. It doesn't actually work well to describe behaviour of animals in terms of it being forced, it doesn't accord well with their behaviour. What works well is to describe animals having freedom, that is very consistent with observation, that in the event the animal could go right or left alternatively, etc.

And when we accept freedom is real, then we must accept the legitemacy of subjectivity, and the invalidity of objectivity, in reaching a conclusion about agency. The animal is creating the information right instead of left, 1 instead of 0, in the moment. Scientific explanations are then about how the animal decided it, while the agency of the choice is left a subjective issue. For example we might say as matter of fact that the choice between right and left was made in conjuction with such and such part of the brain, with such and such subchoices etc., those are the facts of the matter. And then we can subjectively opine that the spirit in which the choice was made was courageous or reckless.

But what these neuroscientists propose is to have a science of how courage, and love, hate works! They say to measure love, hate, and courage as causes which force the result, without any possibility of an alternative being realized. It is simply the exact-same social darwinism of old. It is the same as what the pseudoscientific skull-measurers, and face measurers did previously. They measure the corners of the mouth are turned upward, , then they claim to have measured happiness, that happiness forced the corners of the mouth upward. Not so, the word happiness only applies to agency with a logic of freedom, not force.

[A Poster He or I]

I don't think emergence is 'a paradigm'. It's just an ad hoc which enables materialism to continuously change its definition in such a way that it is able to explain anything new that comes along.

There's a big difference between "continuously change its definition" and "evolve its definition based on new discoveries." The latter is a more intellectually responsible response to the experience gained since the 1960s of material systems operating at levels of high complexity.

If 'matter' itself is a holographic projection or an aspect of subjective experience, then why bother calling it 'matter' and the theories based on it 'materialism'?

The current theory of the universe being a holographic projection derives from String theory and as such is not a materialist theory in quite the manner this thread has been discussing. To my mind, it falls more in line with simulation theories which are closer in spirit to subjective idealism.

The holographic theory of David Bohm which Talbot's book discusses (and to which I referred to earlier) is a materialist theory but does not believe matter to be a holographic projection. Rather it posits a material universe that includes a dimensionless subquantum layer enfolded into normal space-time at every point, allowing for the instantaneously correlated effects we observe in quantum entanglement. "Holographic" is merely a metaphorical description for how the theory allows for the whole of the universe to be contained in every point, much like how holographic film contains the entire hologram within any individual point on the film.

The idea of matter being a mere aspect of subjective experience is outside the mainstream of materialist philosophers that I'm aware of. I believe it myself, however. It simply places the focus on matter as an epistemological construct--which it clearly is (at the least) along with all other cognitive constructs. The significance being that if matter is something "beyond" a cognitive construction, its actual ontology is not relevant to human experience per se (that is, human experience begins with sensorimotor apprehension and cognitive comprehension). Since 2nd-generation cognitive science has empirically demonstrated that the underlying metaphors of cognition are metaphors of a material reality (objects girded by extension and duration), there is justification for materialism to be derived merely from these cognitive metaphors.

[Gene16180]

But that doesn't mean that I think neuroscience ought to be regarded as 'a theory of human nature'

I don’t think neuroscience regards itself as a “theory of human nature”, although more and more aspects of our nature are now being studied scientifically.

or that through scientific analysis of how the brain works, we will necessarily advance morally or philosophically.

The goal of neuroscience is not moral advancement; it’s to understand how the brain works. Although what we learn about ourselves could in theory help us advance morally. As far as philosophical advancement, well, that s up to the philosophers. There have been all sorts of discoveries in neuroscience that have profound implications on the classical inquiries of philosophy. Some philosophers have begun to explore these discoveries and their ramifications while others chose to stubbornly ignore them. But again, the goal of neuroscience is not to subserve philosophy.

That might be because in this context, 'material explanations' are bad ideas, falsely applied.

By “bad” to you mean factually false? Or detrimental to some aspect of society or the human psyche?

It might be, for instance, that they are driven by anti-religious ideologies.

I think that science is driven by an ideology which assumes that the phenomenon we observe have natural explanations. The encroachment of religion and its appeals to the supernatural, seems to me an unavoidable consequence of this ideology. I really don’t think there are many scientists whose careers have been driven by a hatred of religion, rather they are driven by a desire to understand the natural world. In the wake of such passions, religion, along with magic, superstition and the rest of the brood, often become collateral damage. In fact, many materialistic scientists today are sympathetic to religion and will go out of their way to not ruffle feathers.

I have seen your writings before, and you don't actually support science at all. What you propose actually is to prejudicially describe consciousness in terms of force, and to willfully ignore all evidence of freedom.

If you’ve seen my writings then the most concrete statement I made on the subject was

I study neuroscience and I would be the first to tell you want a mystery conciseness really is…

I do, however, think that as time goes on we will hopefully have a better understanding of what we’re dealing with. But the OPs tacit suggestion that, having only begun, neuroscience has already hit a dead-end and we should default to the supernatural, is a suggestion that I for one don’t take seriously. The rest of your post isn’t exactly clear… more about free will and the scourge of science I presume. There are some materialistic scientists who actually think that the complexity of our brains allow for something like free choice, albeit not the tradition notion. Others are not so optimistic. The intellectually honest approach is to have, as a society, an open and evolving discussion of these questions given our increasing knowledge of the world. The hyperboles and hysterical demonization of science won’t get you very far.

[Quotidian]

I don’t think neuroscience regards itself as a “theory of human nature”, although more and more aspects of our nature are now being studied scientifically.

The second phrase contradicts the first.

The goal of neuroscience is not moral advancement; it’s to understand how the brain works. Although what we learn about ourselves could in theory help us advance morally. As far as philosophical advancement, well, that s up to the philosophers. There have been all sorts of discoveries in neuroscience that have profound implications on the classical inquiries of philosophy. Some philosophers have begun to explore these discoveries and their ramifications while others chose to stubbornly ignore them. But again, the goal of neuroscience is not to subserve philosophy.

The second sentence contradicts the first.

What sorts of discoveries have 'profound implications for classical philosophy?' A neuroscientist-philosopher that I have found interesting on the question is the Australian Sir John Eccles, who advocated dualism (in books such as this), as did Wilder Penfield, another distinguished brain scientist. Then there is Alva Nöe, whose Out of our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain is interesting reading, albeit highly critical of reductionism. I am meaning to read Ramachandran and Damasio (although John Searle gave a pretty negative review of the latter’s latest book).

But I am suspicious about any neurological analysis as amounting to a statement about philosophy of mind, because it is implicitly materialist. The philosophical quest for insight, self-knowledge, and ethical purification is not dependent on brain science. For me the paradigm of perfect insight into the nature of mind will always be the Buddha.

I think that science is driven by an ideology which assumes that the phenomenon we observe have natural explanations. The encroachment of religion and its appeals to the supernatural, seems to me an unavoidable consequence of this ideology. I really don’t think there are many scientists whose careers have been driven by a hatred of religion, rather they are driven by a desire to understand the natural world. In the wake of such passions, religion, along with magic, superstition and the rest of the brood, often become collateral damage. In fact, many materialistic scientists today are sympathetic to religion and will go out of their way to not ruffle feathers.

That is rather patronizing to religious philosophers, isn't it? I can't help but notice you reflexively categorize religion with 'magic and superstition and the rest of the brood'. This does bespeak a particular mind-set, doesn’t it? ‘Hatred’ might be a bit strong, but ‘intense distrust’ would not be far off the mark, would it? It is an essentially a positivist or historicist view. Science out-modes religious explanations (and by implication a lot of classical philosophy and metaphysics also). Progress, and all that.

'Seeking natural explanations' sounds to innocent, like an appeal to Rousseau. But it is actually rather more complicated than that. What constitutes ‘nature’ and ‘natural science’ is a culturally-driven construct. By defining ‘nature’ so as to exclude what we understand as ‘supernatural’, we have already adopted a stance as to what to consider and what to exclude. So ideas that ‘sound mystical’ might be excluded on that basis, rather than on their merits.

Besides, as I have noted elsewhere, ‘naturalism’ as an explanatory paradigm has broken down. I think it has been undermined by the multiverse and 'dark matter' and such ideas.

[Janus D Strange]

Finally, something tells me this is not about honest and unbiased skepticism, after all, most people are perfectly fine with material explanations of stars, malaria, the behavior of other animals, etc. Its only when we get to humans that material explanations become so controversial.

Philosophy, eastern and western, has been my main area of interest for more than 30 years. I am relatively new to the experience of posting on 'philosophy' forums. What I have found pretty shocking and frustrating is the seeming lack of understanding of basic philosophical issues shown by many, whose posts at the same time seem to show a respectable knowledge of the latest science.

The recurring problem seems to be a lack of understanding of the distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. There is a kind of 'positivism' inherent in any claim about a 'reality' independent of human experience. This applies as equally to claims that our cognitions of an empirical world, conceptualized in 'materialistic' terms give us knowledge of 'reality' (in the sense of a totally subject-independent reality) as it does to such claims for our metaphysical comprehensions of a spiritual world, conceptualized in 'non-materialistic' terms.

Substantialist theses, whether monist (materialism, idealism), rationalist (Descartes' dualism, Leibniz' Monadology) or 'spiritualist' ( Plato, Plotinus, Aquinas) constituted the bulk of philosophy until Kant performed his great clarification. Much of philosophy since Kant seems to have proceeded despite his achievement, even in contempt of it (usually an emotion expressed by those who, because of their positivist presuppositions, have misunderstood it).

To respond to the quoted passage above, some do argue against the philosophical stance of 'materialism' because they want to oppose it with their own assertions of some 'spiritual' reality or other. With such thinkers material explanations may be controversial.

From the perspective of the philosophy of subjective idealism, represented in various forms by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others 'explanations' of phenomena of human experience such as freedom, love and being couched in 'materialistic' terms are not so much controversial as misplaced; hopelessly limited in principle by being driven by an inappropriate demand for determinate explanations of that which is inherently indeterminate.

If someone wants to argue that they will not believe in the reality of anything 'indeterminate', then I woud say "Fine, good luck with that, you have just announced your intention to cancel your membership in the club of humanity'! Our whole language is permeated with the indeterminate. We make sense of ourselves and our lives in terms of indeterminate notions such as 'freedom'.

Just one more point in relation to "material explanations of stars, malaria, the behavior of other animals". There are no such explanations! There are CONCEPTUAL 'materialistic' DESCRIPTIONS of the behavior of such phenomena, and these are not controversial, as to their form, although they may be, as to their matter. Science, properly measures and describes physical phenomena, this is its province. The problems arise when it arrogates to itself the right to pronounce on other intellectual disciplines, such as philosophy, and propound substantialist metaphysical theories about reality, when it should rightly stick to its limited function of describing and understanding physical processes.

-- Updated November 26th, 2012, 7:01 pm to add the following --

I do, however, think that as time goes on we will hopefully have a better understanding of what we’re dealing with. But the OPs tacit suggestion that, having only begun, neuroscience has already hit a dead-end and we should default to the supernatural, is a suggestion that I for one don’t take seriously. The rest of your post isn’t exactly clear… more about free will and the scourge of science I presume. There are some materialistic scientists who actually think that the complexity of our brains allow for something like free choice, albeit not the tradition notion. Others are not so optimistic. The intellectually honest approach is to have, as a society, an open and evolving discussion of these questions given our increasing knowledge of the world. The hyperboles and hysterical demonization of science won’t get you very far.

Unfortunately neuroscience hasn't hit a dead end; it hasn't even started down the road.

That is, it has started down a road, towards a description and understanding of the determinate, physical processes of the brain. But it hasn't made even the first step down the road, towards a description and understanding of the determinate, physical processes of consciousness, because consciousness is not observable.

Does this make consciousness NOTHING? Who knows even what that might mean? But it does make it NO-THING, and consequently entirely outside the domain of THINGS, which are all that science is, in principle, equipped to deal with.

But are scientists, who like to imagine themselves philosophers, equipped to deal with THAT?