There are some philosophers (e.g. Nagel), however, who question this view, as they argue that even with future revision of science/physics the mind-body problem or so-called "hard problem" of consciousness will remain intractible:The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range...
There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be, with whatever properties it must be assumed to have for the purposes of explanatory theory. Any intelligible theory that offers genuine explanations and that can be assimilated to the core notions of physics becomes part of the theory of the material world, part of our account of body. If we have such a theory in some domain, we seek to assimilate it to the core notions of physics, perhaps modifying these notions as we carry out this enterprise...
The mind-body problem can therefore not even be formulated. The problem cannot be solved, because there is no clear way to state it. Unless someone proposes a definite concept of body, we cannot ask whether some phenomena exceed its bounds.There seems to be no coherent doctrine of materialism and metaphysical naturalism, no issue of eliminativism, no mind-body problem....
[The terms] 'body' and 'the physical world' refer to whatever there is, all of which we try to understand as best we can and to integrate into a coherent theoretical system that we call the natural sciences...If it were shown that the properties of the world fall into two disconnected domains, then we would, I suppose, say that that is the nature of the physical world, nothing more, just as if the world of matter and anti-matter were to prove unrelated.
So, Nagel is arguing that physics is finished for all intensive purposes; thus, the mind-body problem is different from all other so called previous "problems" seen in science, because unlike the others, subjectivity/qualia cannot be reduced/unified to any future “material” entity regardless of future revisions of our "material"/“physical” theories. Nagel believes this because he argues that regardless of future revisions of the physical, it can never expand to include mental phenomena because, in principle, the "physical" would have to assign them an objective or mathematical and/or computational character but any any such character cannot possibly shed any light on subjectivity/qualia/the phenomenal or "feel" of our experience/thoughts. My own position is that it can never be solved. Here is why I believe this:I have heard at least one respected physicist avert that "physics is finished," meaning that even microphysics is already empirically adequate and its physical ontology, its ontology of substances, is reasonably well understood; the remaining projects of microphysics – positing superstrings, constructing a unified field theory and the like–are only matters of interpreting and mathematizing the physical ontology. If that is so, then there is no reason to think that physics will expand its ontology in so fundamental a way as to afford a reduction of the mental that was not already available....Even, if our idea of the physical ever expands to include mental phenomena, it will have to assign them an objective character-whether or not this is done by analyzing them in terms of other phenomena already regarded as physical.
1. Science only reveals the causal / relational properties of physical objects, and that "we know next to nothing about the intrinsic nature of the world. We know only its causal/relational nature." (Russell)
2. While physics can tell us only about the dispositional or relational properties of matter, dispositions ultimately require categorical properties as bases, and relations ultimately require intrinsic properties as relata so there must also be categorical or intrinsic properties about which physics is silent. Yet these are properties of physical objects and thus are physical properties in one central sense. Instantiations of such properties would therefore constitute physical facts of which we are ignorant, as per the ignorance hypothesis. (Stoljar)
3. Matter must have an intrinsic nature to ground its dispositional properties. We know nothing of this nature, and in fact the only intrinsic nature with which we are familiar is consciousness itself. It is arguable that we cannot conceive of any other intrinsic nature because our knowledge of the physical is entirely based upon its dispositions to produce certain conscious experiences under certain conditions. Of course, we can assert that matter has a non-experiential intrinsic nature which is utterly mysterious to us, but this would seem to make the problem of emergence yet more difficult. An emergentism which made the generation of consciousness intelligible would be one that showed how experience emerged from what we know about matter, that is, from its dispositional properties. But it seems impossible to see how the dispositions to move in certain directions under certain conditions could give rise to or constitute consciousness, save by the kind of brute and miraculous radical emergence discussed above. If granting some kind of experiential intrinsic aspect to the fundamental physical entities of the world eliminates this problem, it might be worth the cost in initial uncomfortable implausibility. (Seager/Strawson)
All this sounds plausible (except the last hi-lited part); the part that leads these authors to favour a type of panpsychism. Why do I think this last part of Seager's/Strawson'a argument is flawed? Jussi Jylkkä summarizes it nicely:
I personally cannot see how we will ever be able to break this impasse even with future revisions of physics/science. I do think that Colin McGinn has come the closest to suggesting something that would be required but I don't think that will ever be achievable because non-locality/non-spatiality doesn't seem enough:But now it seems that Strawson is confusing here the possibility of the emergence of mind from scientifically described properties like mass, charge, or spin, with the possibility of the emergence of mind from the intrinsic properties that correspond to these scientific properties. It is indeed the case that mind cannot emerge from scientifically described extrinsic properties like mass, charge, and spin, but do we know that mind could not emerge from the intrinsic properties that underlie these scientifically observable properties? It might be argued that since we know absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of mass, charge, and spin, we simply cannot tell whether they could be something non-mental and still constitute mentality when organised properly. It might well be that mentality is like liquidity: the intrinsic nature of mass, charge and spin might not be mental itself, just like individual H2O-molecules are not liquid themselves, but could nevertheless constitute mentality when organised properly, just like H2O-molecules can constitute liquidity when organised properly (this would be a variation of neutral monism). In short, the problem is that we just do not know enough about the intrinsic nature of the fundamental level of reality that we could say almost anything about it...Thus, even if the intrinsic nature of electrons and other fundamental particles is in fact mental, this does not mean that it should be anything like human mentality—rather, we can only say that the ontological category their intrinsic nature belongs to is the same as the one our phenomenal realm belongs to. This category in the most general sense is perhaps best titled ‘ideal’.
How do conscious events cause physical changes in the body? Not by proximate contact, apparently, on pain of over-spatialising consciousness, and presumably not by action-at-a-distance either. Recent philosophy has become accustomed to the idea of mental causation, but this is actually much more mysterious than is generally appreciated, once the non-spatial character of consciousness is acknowledged. To put it differently, we understand mental causation only if we deny the intuition of non-spatiality. The standard analogy with physical unobservables simply dodges these hard questions, lulling us into a false sense of intelligibility....
Conscious phenomena are not located and extended in the usual way; but then again they are surely not somehow 'outside' of space, adjacent perhaps to the abstract realm. Rather, they bear an opaque and anomalous relation to space, as space is currently conceived. They seem neither quite 'in' it nor quite 'out' of it. Presumably, however, this is merely an epistemological fact, not an ontological one. It is just that we lack the theory with which to make sense of the relation in question. In themselves consciousness and space must be related in some intelligible naturalistic fashion, though they may have to be conceived very differently from the way they now are for this to become apparent. My conjecture is that it is in this nexus that the solution to the space problem lies. Consciousness is the next big anomaly to call for a revision in how we conceive space-just as other revisions were called for by earlier anomalies. And the revision is likely to be large-scale, despite the confinement of consciousness to certain small pockets of the natural world. This is because space is such a fundamental feature of things that anything that produces disturbances in our conception of it must cut pretty deeply into our world-view....That is the region in which our ignorance is focused: not in the details of neurophysiological activity but, more fundamentally, in how space is structured or constituted. That which we refer to when we use the word 'space' has a nature that is quite different from how we standardly conceive it to be; so different, indeed, that it is capable of 'containing' the non-spatial (as we now conceive it) phenomenon of consciousness.