© MRImanMRI scan of the brain.
Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is an extraordinarily
complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells - known as neurons - each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve connections.
We have made a
great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?
There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness - it was not taken to be a fitting topic for "serious science". Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness.
The problem of consciousness, however, is radically unlike any other scientific problem. One reason is that consciousness is unobservable. You can't look inside someone's head and see their feelings and experiences. If we were just going off what we can observe from a third-person perspective, we would have no grounds for postulating consciousness at all.
© Olga DanylenkoOnly you can experience your emotions.
Of course, scientists are used to dealing with unobservables. Electrons, for example, are too small to be seen. But scientists postulate unobservable entities in order to explain what we observe, such as lightning or vapour trails in cloud chambers. But in the unique case of consciousness, the thing to be explained cannot be observed. We know that consciousness exists not through experiments but through our immediate awareness of our feelings and experiences.
So how can science ever explain it? When we are dealing with the data of observation, we can do experiments to test whether what we observe matches what the theory predicts. But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this methodology breaks down. The best scientists are able to do is to correlate unobservable experiences with observable processes, by
scanning people's brains and relying on their reports regarding their private conscious experiences.
By this method, we can establish, for example, that the invisible feeling of hunger is correlated with visible activity in the brain's hypothalamus. But the accumulation of such correlations does not amount to a theory of consciousness. What we ultimately want is to explain
why conscious experiences are correlated with brain activity. Why is it that such activity in the hypothalamus comes along with a feeling of hunger?
In fact, we should not be surprised that our standard scientific method struggles to deal with consciousness. As I explore in my new book,
Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, modern science was explicitly designed to exclude consciousness.
Before the "father of modern science"
Galileo Galilei, scientists believed that the physical world was filled with qualities, such as colours and smells. But Galileo wanted a purely quantitative science of the physical world, and he therefore proposed that these qualities were not really in the physical world but in consciousness, which he stipulated was outside of the domain of science.
This worldview forms the backdrop of science to this day. And so long as we work within it, the best we can do is to establish correlations between the quantitative brain processes we can see and the qualitative experiences that we can't, with no way of explaining why they go together.
Mind is matterI believe there is a way forward, an approach that's rooted in work from the 1920s by the philosopher
Bertrand Russell and the scientist
Arthur Eddington. Their starting point was that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is.
This may seem bizarre, but it turns out that physics is confined to telling us about the
behaviour of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterised in terms of behaviour - attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call "the intrinsic nature of matter", how matter is in and of itself.
It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view - physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.
The result is a type of "
panpsychism" - an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the
"new wave" of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter - nothing spiritual or supernatural - but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter "from the outside", in terms of its behaviour, but matter "from the inside" is constituted of forms of consciousness.
This means that mind
is matter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness. Before you write that off, consider this. Consciousness
can vary in complexity. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences of a horse are much less complex than those of a human being, and that the conscious experiences of a rabbit are less sophisticated than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, there may be a point where consciousness suddenly switches off - but it's also possible that it just fades but never disappears completely, meaning even an electron has a tiny element of consciousness.
What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. Strictly speaking it cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness entails that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations is not strictly speaking testable. But I believe it can be justified by a form of inference to the best explanation: panpsychism is the
simplest theory of how consciousness fits in to our scientific story.
While our current scientific approach offers no theory at all - only correlations - the traditional alternative of claiming that consciousness is in the soul leads to a profligate picture of nature in which mind and body are distinct. Panpsychism avoids both of these extremes, and this is why some of our leading neuroscientists are now
embracing it as the best framework for building a science of consciousness.
I am optimistic that we will one day have a science of consciousness, but it won't be science as we know it today. Nothing less than a revolution is called for, and it's already on its way.
Reader Comments
@Isjarvi:
A good read (for you) might be, 'The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object' by Franklin Merrill-Wolf.
It has been years and I am sourcing my memory and not the 'instant oatmeal' internet for that title and author.
So I could be mistaken on certain particulars.
Unlike instant oatmeal.
Which is always right.
ned,
out
What happens with this ghost when we die?
If someone has an out-of-body experience, and experiences something that should really have been impossible from the currently accepted mainstream scientific perspective, then we can demonstrate that consciousness is not restricted to being a phenomenon that can only occur inside a brain.
People whose bodies have literally died, with their brain waves and all other vital signs having completely flatlined before they have been resuscitated from apparent complete death, have recounted experiences of being out of their bodies during the time when the usual mainstream scientific understanding is that such experience could not have been possible at all, with individuals recalling visual descriptions of activities in operating theatres, and even of details of conversations they have witnessed being held between surgeons and other medical staff, when 'scientifically' speaking, such a thing would have been totally impossible according to the current mainstream scientific theory that consciousness is impossible outside the brain, or after death of the human body and brain.
Quite frankly, there is something quite political, quite sinister in the ridiculous assertion that consciousness only occurs in the brain, when the actual experience of a great many clearly shows otherwise.
A huge proportion of people have conscious psychic experiences, yet there seems to be an almost Big Brother approach by 'conventional science' to prove that telepathy and other psychic phenomena like life after death are all literally impossible.
It is a stated objective of the Marxist agenda to destroy all Gentile religions and the communal mystical knowledge and psychic sensitivity of each Gentile society, this being designed to deaden our mystical sensitivities and to prevent spiritual, psychic or mystical knowledge being passed on, essentially to weaken and downgrade every non-Jewish people in order to make them more suitable for complete subjugation.
All communication between Gentiles is now intended to be only by means that can be effectively monitored, for instance by an all-seeing worldwide electronic surveillance program like the current Israeli Talpiot Program.
The practice of non-surveillable telepathy by more liberated people is being massively discouraged and disabled by fluoride etc., with synthetic telepathy, via microwave, being restricted only to government intelligence agency and military usage.
The intention is to restrict acceptable means of even day-to-day intercommunication of any type of information to those which are entirely surveillable, by means of microphone, spy software currently built into the back of all computers and mobile phone devices and other means, to reduce us all to mere men of clay golem suitable as nothing more than soulless programmable slave robots, something intended to be facilitated by the current (malevolently intended malgenic or dysgenic) mass racial interbreeding program which the Jewish ex-French leader Sarkozy stated is actually 'imperative' for the French people and not merely a matter of choice.
What Sarkozy stated is truly frightening, representing a truly vile form of Jewish warfare against the rest of humanity, the Jewish-controlled state-controlled breeding out of the white people, and the creation of an new, totally interbred race. Of course, the Jews themselves are not intending to be interbred with their own created slave race.
Only mass-surveillable means of communication are to be acceptable, with telepathy and other psychic phenomena increasingly being ridiculed and even being criminalized in practical terms in many instances by the current medical establishment. Again, the Marxist agenda does actually include the stated intention to increasingly use medical services to criminalize and punish 'subversive' opinions and activities, rather than to use the police and law courts for such purposes.
As far as the Jewish-controlled authorities are concerned, if they cannot see and hear exactly what you are doing, then you should not be doing it at all. Hence the stated intention of the Noahide Laws and of the Jewish death cult in general to literally destroy all other religions and ultimately to physically kill any human beings who will surely attempt to carry on practicing those other religions under the intended draconian Stalinist regime that will use lethal military and other means to enforce those laws.
Witchcraft was effectively illegal in Great Britain from 1735 until 1951, yet the UN has already approved the idea of worldwide Noahide Laws that are intended to be implemented all over the world in every nation at some future time, which literally term all non-Jewish religion as 'idolatrous', and as such, illegal, which is a means of destroying access to multidimensional consciousness to all the Gentiles, who, the Jewish law states, are all to made slaves, at least those few hundred million Gentiles who are allowed to survive the mass purges intended under the Noahide Laws, there being 6 billion people in the world who practice 'idolatrous' religions today, as all Gentiles who insist on carrying on practicing Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Wodenism, etc. are all literally intended under the terms of the Noahide Laws to be physically exterminated (a process which is already well underway by a wide variety of surreptitious means despite the apparent absence of any official implementation of such laws, indeed, the fact that they have not yet been officially accepted by many nations or officially implemented by them is one of the means of providing deniability).
The Jewish idea is to remove all hope of communal telepathic social intercommunication and sensitivity between Gentiles, and to remove all hopes of spiritual escape from this dimension from the Gentile souls, to restrict any access to psychic or spiritual higher dimensions, to prevent any use by Gentiles of non-surveillable methods of intercommunication on any level of consciousness, to strongly discourage even belief in the possibility of such a thing as telepathy and multi-dimensional consciousness.
The Jewish idea is to make the human skulls of the goyim literal prison houses, to destroy any hope for the Gentiles not only of engaging in traditional means of telepathy and psychic means of communal sensitivity within their societies that would permit any multidimensional knowledge and intercommunication, but also to prevent Gentile souls from ever escaping from bondage to the Jews under slavery.
The piling up of assumed predicates to which the world (life) then has to fit - demands the dumbing down of a slave unit to its narrative programming as well as a denial of the living to conform and comply to a dead model.
Predicates are anything added to being - which could be called a 'beingness'.
I Am is being. I am a man predicated being. I am writing. I am aware of.. etc.
Existence is simply already so. beingnesses are all the attributes we give it - accept true and suffer to be real.
Science can think about and explore predicates and can question them but it cannot operate without them.
One has to start from somewhere.
Descartes began with "I think, therefore I am". While this CAN suggest Self-awareness in recognition of being - it is taken as a pronoun verbing its own existence - and stands in opposition to the meaning of 'The Bridegroom cometh when ye thinketh not'.
'Bridegroom' representing the resonance of a true recognition (Self-Aware) as unexpected, in neglecting to 'think about'. IE: not a manufactured 'reality'.
Welcome to the DREAM TIME.
Now we are living in a dark, barbaric era of the science