New Mysterianism

Overview and Origins

New Mysterianism is a position in contemporary philosophy of mind which holds that human beings are, in principle, incapable of fully understanding consciousness. It is “mysterian” because it treats consciousness as an intractable mystery for us, and “new” to distinguish it from older, often religious or dualistic appeals to mystery. New Mysterians typically insist that the mystery is naturalistic, rooted in the structure and cognitive limits of the human brain, not in anything supernatural.

The view is most closely associated with Colin McGinn, especially through works such as The Problem of Consciousness (1991) and The Mysterious Flame (1999). McGinn argues that the relationship between physical brain processes and subjective experience (or qualia) is a problem “cognitively closed” to human beings. Earlier, Thomas Nagel’s influential essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) had already emphasized the apparent gap between objective description and subjective experience, and Noam Chomsky’s notion of “cognitive limits” in linguistics and science more broadly served as an important background inspiration.

New Mysterianism arose in the late 20th century amid intense debates over physicalism, functionalism, and the “hard problem of consciousness” (a term later popularized by David Chalmers). While many philosophers sought positive theories of how consciousness could emerge from or be identical to brain processes, New Mysterians suggested that our inability to see how this can be so may not be due to a lack of effort or data, but to deep constraints on the kinds of explanations our minds can grasp.

Core Claims and Arguments

New Mysterianism combines several key theses:

1. Cognitive Closure
   The central idea is that humans are subject to cognitive closure regarding certain problems: some truths are real and fully determinate, yet forever beyond the reach of human understanding. Just as a dog cannot grasp calculus, human beings, on this view, cannot grasp the correct theory of how physical processes yield conscious experience.

2. The Hard Problem as Principally Insoluble
   The “hard problem of consciousness” concerns explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to what it feels like to see red, taste coffee, or feel pain. New Mysterians maintain that this explanatory gap is not just temporary. It reflects a structural mismatch between our conceptual resources and the deep nature of mind–brain relations. Even an ideally advanced neuroscience, they claim, might leave us still unable to see, in an intelligible way, why such physical processes are accompanied by experience.

3. Naturalism Without Reduction
   Although they deny that humans can understand consciousness, New Mysterians are usually naturalists: they do not infer that consciousness is non-physical or supernatural. Instead, they argue that the world is entirely natural, but our conceptual scheme is too limited to grasp its fundamental mental–physical properties. Consciousness, on this view, is wholly grounded in the brain, yet the relevant properties or relations are cognitively inaccessible to us.

4. Analogy with Animal Minds and Perception
   Proponents often draw analogies: just as some animals lack the cognitive or perceptual apparatus to understand certain features of reality, humans may be similarly limited. We might be constitutionally unable to form the right concepts or develop the right explanatory models to make sense of consciousness, no matter how much empirical data we gather.

5. Pragmatic and Scientific Implications
   New Mysterianism does not usually recommend giving up on empirical research. Neuroscience can still map correlations between brain states and experiences, improve medical treatments, and refine psychological theories. The claim is that such work will never deliver a deeply satisfying, transparent understanding of why and how neural processes produce subjective experience.

Criticisms and Influence

New Mysterianism has been both influential and controversial.

Criticisms fall into several main categories:

• Premature Skepticism: Many critics argue that declaring consciousness permanently mysterious is unwarranted pessimism. They liken it to pre-modern claims that the motion of planets or the nature of life were beyond understanding, both later overturned by scientific progress.

• Self-Undermining Concerns: Some philosophers contend that asserting cognitive closure about consciousness requires a kind of higher-order knowledge about our own limits that might itself be questionable. If we cannot grasp the nature of consciousness, how can we confidently know that we cannot?

• Alternative Explanations of Intuition: Others suggest that the sense of mystery arises from current conceptual habits or linguistic confusions, not from any deep limit on human cognition. On these views, improved theories—perhaps in neuroscience, information theory, or revised metaphysics—may eventually dissolve the apparent gap.

• Risk of Stagnation: Critics worry that if New Mysterianism became widely accepted, it might discourage attempts at bold theorizing about consciousness and slow progress in the field.

Despite these objections, New Mysterianism has had significant influence:

• It has reinforced the idea that intellectual humility is appropriate in philosophy of mind, emphasizing that humans may not be the measure of all possible understanding.
• It has provided a distinctive standpoint in debates over physicalism, allowing one to affirm physicalism while denying that humans can comprehend how it is true in detail.
• It has shaped discussions of cognitive limits more broadly, connecting philosophy of mind to debates in cognitive science, linguistics, and epistemology about what finite, evolved minds can and cannot know.

New Mysterianism remains a minority position, but it occupies an important place in contemporary thought as a carefully articulated form of agnosticism about the ultimate intelligibility of consciousness to human reason. It frames philosophical reflection around the possibility that some of our deepest questions may have answers that, while real, lie permanently beyond our cognitive reach.