Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science – perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love: it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can claim to have understood and explained it completely. There’s no doubt it’s associated with the brain in some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. How do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?
David Chalmers, a professor at the Australian National University, has dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness; but many scientists, particularly those who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them, it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity – that is, consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as out-of-body experiences or the conscious survival of death, as both consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.
Other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy – that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like that of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case, when the TV set is destroyed – dead – the signal still continues. Full story...
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David Chalmers, a professor at the Australian National University, has dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness; but many scientists, particularly those who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them, it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity – that is, consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as out-of-body experiences or the conscious survival of death, as both consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.
Other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy – that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like that of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case, when the TV set is destroyed – dead – the signal still continues. Full story...
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