[goatlover]

The modern philosophical argument against a scientific explanation of consciousness is that science is an objective, third person pursuit, abstracting away from subjective, first person. If so, you can't hope to explain the subjective in terms of the objective.

There is no need to invoke the spiritual or supernatural to see that consciousness is a problem for science.

[bbctol]

It honestly depends on who you ask. A lot of people think consciousness is inherently unsolvable by normal science (Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness"), but there are plenty (Dennett etc.) who will deny that such a hard problem exists, and make reasonable arguments that the scientific method can make headway in reductively explaining consciousness.