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The potential irreducibility of a human consciousness and its implications.
Short: We can understand the relation of abnormalities in the brain to self-described subjective impressions by a conscious person (read everything Sacks wrote if that interests you; a truly brilliant and compassionate man). We can measure brain activity during the subjective experience of various states.
What we cannot, and I suspect will not ever be able to understand, is how precisely it is that the movement of electrons, blood, and so forth, around the organic set of circuits that is the brain produces consciousness and precisely what it is that the stuff of consciousness consists in.
Consciousness is affected by objects and events describable by physical laws. But it itself is entirely unaffected by physical laws. It is unbounded. It's only apparent physical constraint is that one's own consciousness appears - in a bizarre non-physical way (if you think about it) - to be rooted just behind one's own eyeballs. But even that can be altered by drugs, by traumatic experiences, in dreams, and so forth.
"What is consciousness" may be as utterly irreducible as "what is mass-ness" and "what is energy-ness". (If one here raises string theory, which explains what is mass-ness and what is energyness, I then respond: What is string-ness? What is the stuff of strings?)
Or, will we eventually be able to reduce it to some further (itself irreducible?) part? And what will that mean?
And should we start thinking really carefully about sending a bunch of electrons through some silicon wafers when we don't know why it is that doing the same thing through neurons produces you and me?
Short: We can understand the relation of abnormalities in the brain to self-described subjective impressions by a conscious person (read everything Sacks wrote if that interests you; a truly brilliant and compassionate man). We can measure brain activity during the subjective experience of various states.
What we cannot, and I suspect will not ever be able to understand, is how precisely it is that the movement of electrons, blood, and so forth, around the organic set of circuits that is the brain produces consciousness and precisely what it is that the stuff of consciousness consists in.
Consciousness is affected by objects and events describable by physical laws. But it itself is entirely unaffected by physical laws. It is unbounded. It's only apparent physical constraint is that one's own consciousness appears - in a bizarre non-physical way (if you think about it) - to be rooted just behind one's own eyeballs. But even that can be altered by drugs, by traumatic experiences, in dreams, and so forth.
"What is consciousness" may be as utterly irreducible as "what is mass-ness" and "what is energy-ness". (If one here raises string theory, which explains what is mass-ness and what is energyness, I then respond: What is string-ness? What is the stuff of strings?)
Or, will we eventually be able to reduce it to some further (itself irreducible?) part? And what will that mean?
And should we start thinking really carefully about sending a bunch of electrons through some silicon wafers when we don't know why it is that doing the same thing through neurons produces you and me?