Cognitive Closure: Why the Mind-Body Problem Might Be Beyond Us
Colin McGinn's 1989 paper offers an unsettling third option in the consciousness debate: maybe the problem is real, has a natural solution, and is still permanently beyond our reach.
Most positions on consciousness fall into two camps. Either the mind–body problem has a solution we will eventually find (the optimist's view), or there is something irreducibly non-physical about experience that no science can capture (the dualist's view). In “Can We Solve the Mind–Body Problem?”, Colin McGinn proposes a third option that is stranger than both: the problem has a perfectly natural, physical solution — we just happen to be the kind of creatures who cannot, in principle, understand it.
McGinn calls this position cognitive closure. A mind is cognitively closed with respect to some property or theory if its concept-forming faculties cannot, in principle, grasp it. A dog's mind is closed to arithmetic; this is not a failure of effort or evidence, but of the kind of mind a dog has. McGinn's claim is that human minds may stand in exactly that relation to the property of the brain that explains consciousness.
The shape of the argument
The reasoning runs roughly as follows. There must be some natural property — call it P — in virtue of which brains give rise to conscious experience. Consciousness is not magic; it depends on the brain. So P exists. The question is whether we can ever form a concept of P.
We form concepts in two main ways: by introspecting our own experience, and by perceiving and theorising about the physical world. But introspection only ever delivers more consciousness — it never reveals the underlying basis of consciousness. And perception of the brain delivers only its physical, spatial properties: cells, chemistry, electrical activity. Neither route, McGinn argues, can deliver P, the property that links the two. The link itself falls into a blind spot created by the very structure of our cognition.
The problem is not that consciousness is non-physical. It is that the bridge between the physical and the experiential is built from materials our minds cannot pick up.
Why “mysterianism” is not mysticism
McGinn's view is often labelled “mysterianism,” which can make it sound like a retreat into the supernatural. It is the opposite. McGinn is a thoroughgoing naturalist: he insists the mind–body link is ordinary, lawful, and physical. The mystery is epistemic, not metaphysical. There is no spooky stuff — only a limit on the knower. This is what makes the position worth taking seriously even if you ultimately reject it: it explains why the hard problem feels so uniquely intractable, without giving up on physicalism.
The obvious objection
The natural reply is self-referential: how can McGinn know that P is unknowable? To claim that a property lies beyond all possible human concepts seems to require a vantage point we do not have. Critics argue that “we haven't solved it yet” is a long way from “we cannot, in principle, solve it,” and that the history of science is full of problems once declared off-limits that later dissolved. McGinn's response is that closure is the default expectation for any finite, evolved cognitive system — the surprise would be a mind able to understand everything — but the debate here is genuinely unresolved, and that is part of why the paper still rewards reading.
Why it still matters
Cognitive closure reframes the consciousness debate as partly a question about the knower, not only the known. That move has consequences well beyond philosophy of mind. It asks us to take seriously the idea that the structure of a cognitive system sets hard boundaries on what that system can represent — a question that returns, in a very concrete form, when we build artificial systems and ask what they can and cannot model. If some truths are closed to human minds because of how those minds are built, it is worth asking which truths might be closed, or open, to minds built very differently. That is a thread we will return to in later essays.
Read the paper: McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind–Body Problem?” (PDF) · Mind, 98(391), 1989.