We toggle back and forth between perspectives all the time without knowing it.  When you and I talk, I read your face and body language as expressions of meaning, so when your face twists up in unhappiness, I think, “oh no, I said something stupid again.”  But you explain that you have heartburn, so I stop seeing your nasty-face as an expression of meaning and I start seeing it as physical condition. 

 

Consciousness: this is the mother of all perspective switches.  To feel in first-person experience is not the same as watching in third-person.  They can never be one.  Only I can feel the feeling that I’m feeling; other people can observe it but they can’t feel it.  For example, a neuroscientist can open my skull and electrically probe my brain to find the location of all my sensations.  He can watch my brain light up on a computer screen and even talk with me during the process.  With all his million-dollar equipment, though, for our neuroscientist to know what I’m feeling, he must ask me and I must tell him.  He can never feel what I’m feeling.  And the same is true for me during the process: I can watch the computer screen and see my brain light up and simultaneously I can feel the feeling.  But what I feel and what I watch on the screen are separate.  The two are never one: my feeling is one thing, and my watching the screen is something else. 

 

Third-person perspective can never be first-person perspective.  Brain is not mind.  Let’s pretend a neuroscientist has labeled every single neuron in my brain and he knows what each one does, and now he has remote access to my brain and can watch it light up on a computer screen.  Can his computer screen show why I snubbed you at the dinner table last night?  No.  The neuroscientist can explain to you that neuronal loop #8,091,589.61H lit up while I was snubbing you, but that won’t explain anything and won’t give you satisfaction.  Rather, our neuroscientist must ask me what happened, and maybe I respond that you belittled my favorite musician and I became defensive, afraid that you were looking down on me.  My feelings and intentions tell the tale, not my neurons.  The neuroscientist can look at my brain until the end of time but he’ll never bridge the gap.  And talking about my neurons won’t bridge the gap between you and me, either.  Instead, I must tell you why I snubbed you, then I must tell you that I’m sorry.

 

In sum, a third-person, scientific perspective can’t see first-person experience; it only sees the material brain, therefore it classifies consciousness as a function of the material brain.  “Science sees us as objects rather than as subjects, and its descriptions of our responses are not descriptions of what we feel” (Roger Scruton from Scientism in the Arts and Humanities; The New Atlantis, Fall 2013). 

 

A scientific, materialist perspective is necessary but not sufficient.  I need another perspective to understand human reality and the ideas and meanings that pass among us.  Spinoza said, “The mind and the body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.”  Mind and body are the same thing, but we can’t explain one in terms of the other, nor can we reduce one to the other.  We see them from different, incompatible perspectives.  When I listen to you speak, I can see your neurons firing and hormones raging, or I can listen to the meaning of your words.  My perspective on you determines the nature of you that I see: biological machine or person, It or Thou.  Both perspectives are true, but we see them either/or like two sides of one coin.

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In that same article, Roger Scruton uses music as an example: “Science tells us a lot about the ordered sequences of pitched sounds; but it tells us nothing about melodies.”  I experience music as the meaning of the sounds.  Both sound and meaning exist, but they’re different planes of reality.