David Chalmers calls this form of idealism one of "the handful of promising approaches to the mind–
body problem."[127]
New mysterianism, most significantly associated with the philosopher Colin McGinn, proposes that the
human mind, in its current form, will not be able to explain consciousness.[128][11] McGinn draws on
Noam Chomsky's distinction between problems, which are in principle solvable, and mysteries, which
human cognitive faculties are unequipped to ever understand, and places the mind–body problem in the
latter category.[128] His position is that a naturalistic explanation does exist but that the human mind is
cognitively closed to it due to its limited range of intellectual abilities.[128] He cites Jerry Fodor's concept
of the modularity of mind in support of cognitive closure.[128]
While in McGinn's strong form, new mysterianism states that the relationship between consciousness and
the material world can never be understood by the human mind, there are also weaker forms that argue it
cannot be understood within existing paradigms but that advances in science or philosophy may open the
way to other solutions (see above).[43] The ideas of Thomas Nagel and Joseph Levine fall into the second
category.[43] Steven Pinker has also endorsed this weaker version of the view, summarizing it as
follows:[9]
And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when
pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of
evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't
hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps
can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should
give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit
that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius—a Darwin or Einstein of
consciousness—comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to
us.
Philosopher Raamy Majeed argued in 2016 that the hard problem is associated with two "explanatory
targets":[54]
1. [PQ] Physical processing gives rise to experiences with a phenomenal character.
2. [Q] Our phenomenal qualities are thus-and-so.
The first fact concerns the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal (i.e., how and why are
some physical states felt states), whereas the second concerns the very nature of the phenomenal itself
(i.e., what does the felt state feel like?).
Wolfgang Fasching argues that the hard problem is not about qualia, but about the what-it-is-like-ness of
experience in Nagel's sense—about the givenness of phenomenal contents:
New mysterianism
Commentary on the problem's explanatory targets