Science and the riddle of consciousness
Francis Aznaran
The riddle of consciousness is how precisely the non-physical entity which we may call mind arises out of what appears to that mind to be purely physical, and further, what the manner is by which said construction can possess an awareness of its own existence and its own functionality, or which may be called the capacity to self-examine. The realm of the physical sciences, which has hitherto had great success in the explanation of non-mental phenomena, could (I believe) at best help to resolve the first of these issues, but not the second. The scientific method has had an increasing propensity to provide for humanity the most apparently plausible explanations for the behaviour of the physical world. Thus, for example, lightning, once believe to be caused by the smash of Thor's hammer, we now reckon to be the visual manifestation of the discharge of electoral potential in the atmosphere. The changing of the tides, the falling of objects ÂdownwardsÊ, the periodic fluctuations of ÂdaylightÊ; all of these once seemed to have no possible provenance other than the supernatural, but these beliefs have been gradually replaced by theoretical models which have been able not only to explain but also to predict in a precise and highly accurate manner the behaviour of these events as observed in the physical universe. For simple life forms such as amoeba and plants, we have also been able to explain life-related behaviour such as tropism and active transport. Thus the domain of what it is that may be explained by some scientific theory has been constantly expanding and the scale of the [models] extends from the subatomic to the universal and everything in between.
developed this expansive process appears to cease. For in the mind we seem to observe an example of a non-physical existence but an existence [nonetheless]. Though the mind appears to have some physical characteristics, such as being constrained to observe only so much as the location of the body in which it resides can allow, it appears to have some fundamental distinction from the behaviour of the physical world, what I will call the property of being ÂvirtualÊ. Though science has been able to identify the physical source of the mind (i.e. the brain in the skull –the consciousness having once believed to be issued from the heart), mind itself has no obvious physical presence. While mental phenomena certainly corresponds to physical changes in the brain (ÂseeingÊ things appears to be in conjunction with electrical activity in the visual cortex, for example), the mind and its associated characteristics are not one and the same as chemical and electrical activity in the grey piece of flesh. However as far as we know, a mind only comes into existence as a result of the growth of a life-form, and what is more, the virtual mind seems to be able to affect things in the physical world, this being done by the electrical impulses from the brain to the rest of the body so that it might move our limbs to [attain] the physical world by which we are surrounded. Thus there seems to be a two-way relationship between a virtual existence and the physical reality; the mind causes and is caused by, changes in the physical world. Yet the relationship between cause and effect appears distinct from the same relationship between physical phenomena, which can be explained via physical means. There seems to be a ÂgapÊ life-forms, however,
When one examines the mental existence and behaviour exhibited in our most
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