The Experience Of Being Human

Bryan Appleyard makes a distinction between science and subjective experience:

[L]look at the two headlines on these two Andrew pieces – Can Science Explain Beauty? and Does Neuroscience Kill Free Will? Yes, we may retrofit a Darwinian account of beauty and we may show the brain making decisions before we do, but, apart from the gaping holes in the logic of the such findings that would have to be filled, why would this explain or kill anything? Explaining beauty does not mean explaining the experience of beauty – how could it? – and showing I have no free will does not remove my overwhelming impression that I have.

All these things arise from the misapplication of reductionism. Of course, we can explain things downwards, that is how science works, but we cannot explain things upwards.