I
magine being given a computer chip that contains a video game, but designed for a computer architecture with which you're unfamiliar, on a completely foreign operating system, in a programming language that you do not know. Imagine trying to decipher what was actually happening in the game, how it works, purely via analysis of the various bits turning off an on. Even for a relatively simple game, I hope it's obvious that this is essentially an impossible task. There just isn't enough context to be able to make sense of what's going on.
This problem is compounded if you don't even know what kind of program you're dealing with. You don't know if it's a game, or a workflow algorithm. You don't know if it has visual outputs, or is purely performing "under the hood" calculations. You don't know what level of abstraction its written in. All you see are little lights turning off and on.
This is a microcosm of the problem that faces neurologists. In fact, the problem they face is many orders of magnitude more difficult, and the tools they have less informative than those than can access computer chips. The way that the brain generates consciousness, stores memory, understands the world -- all of these are buried so, so unbelievably deep in a hyper-optimized system that was never designed with the intent to be "read" by anyone other than the conscious being experiencing the world via its mechanisms. The task of the neuroscientist -- to understand the principles at work that govern the human mind and its biological substrate -- may very well be literally, mathematically, impossible. All we can do is gesture at certain areas and say "this lights up when the subject reports this experience." But to call this knowledge; to say that we understand anything about consciousness from these vague assignations, is little more than denial. I do not envy them their work.