FoxTrot
02-03-2007, 01:57 PM
Richard Rhodes wrote:
That slab of meat in your skull - a 3-pound walnut of wetware - somehow puts the you in you. Nobody really knows how. Philosophers since Plato have pondered the issue. And probing the relationship between mind and body was the central goal of psychology until behaviorists closed the door on mind in the early 20th century and focused on observable actions. But only recently have scientists tried to tackle consciousness, spurred by new tools like functional MRI and PET scans that can augment traditional clinical research by showing brain activity.
Already, however, these researchers find themselves haggling over familiar questions. Is consciousness merely wakefulness? No, we’re conscious when we dream. Is it our sense of personal identity? Yes, but surely it’s also the stream of words and images that runs through what William James called the “extended present,” the immediate workspace of our minds. It’s perception, but it’s also reflection - summoning up visual and verbal constructions, imaginary or real. It’s simulation, mentally walking ourselves through situations before we face them, learning and practicing, hoping to avert pratfalls.
No surprise, then, given this confusion, that scientific theories on consciousness are all over the map. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who studies brain-damaged patients, speculates that self-awareness evolved in humans as a regulatory mechanism, a way for the brain to understand what is going on with the body. He calls “the coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental” a “turning point in the long history of life.” Caltech’s Christof Koch, who studies vision as the starting point for mind, believes that people have specific “consciousness neurons.” And Bernard Baars of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego suggests that consciousness is a controlling gateway to unconscious mechanisms such as working memory, word meanings, visual memory, and learning.
Some philosophers still argue that consciousness is too subjective to explain, or that it is the irreducible result of matter organized in a specific way. That philosophic black-boxing is probably more nostalgic than scientific, a clinging to the idea of a spirit or soul. Without that, after all, we’re just organisms - more complex, but no less predictable, than dung beetles. But scientists live to reduce the seemingly irreducible, and sentimentality is off-limits in the lab. Understanding consciousness means finding the biophysical mechanisms that generate it. Somewhere behind your eyes, that meat becomes the mind.
That slab of meat in your skull - a 3-pound walnut of wetware - somehow puts the you in you. Nobody really knows how. Philosophers since Plato have pondered the issue. And probing the relationship between mind and body was the central goal of psychology until behaviorists closed the door on mind in the early 20th century and focused on observable actions. But only recently have scientists tried to tackle consciousness, spurred by new tools like functional MRI and PET scans that can augment traditional clinical research by showing brain activity.
Already, however, these researchers find themselves haggling over familiar questions. Is consciousness merely wakefulness? No, we’re conscious when we dream. Is it our sense of personal identity? Yes, but surely it’s also the stream of words and images that runs through what William James called the “extended present,” the immediate workspace of our minds. It’s perception, but it’s also reflection - summoning up visual and verbal constructions, imaginary or real. It’s simulation, mentally walking ourselves through situations before we face them, learning and practicing, hoping to avert pratfalls.
No surprise, then, given this confusion, that scientific theories on consciousness are all over the map. Antonio Damasio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the University of Southern California who studies brain-damaged patients, speculates that self-awareness evolved in humans as a regulatory mechanism, a way for the brain to understand what is going on with the body. He calls “the coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental” a “turning point in the long history of life.” Caltech’s Christof Koch, who studies vision as the starting point for mind, believes that people have specific “consciousness neurons.” And Bernard Baars of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego suggests that consciousness is a controlling gateway to unconscious mechanisms such as working memory, word meanings, visual memory, and learning.
Some philosophers still argue that consciousness is too subjective to explain, or that it is the irreducible result of matter organized in a specific way. That philosophic black-boxing is probably more nostalgic than scientific, a clinging to the idea of a spirit or soul. Without that, after all, we’re just organisms - more complex, but no less predictable, than dung beetles. But scientists live to reduce the seemingly irreducible, and sentimentality is off-limits in the lab. Understanding consciousness means finding the biophysical mechanisms that generate it. Somewhere behind your eyes, that meat becomes the mind.