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Science is turning out to be
pretty apologetic these days, and not admitting it. Just 50 years ago, for
instance, talking about consciousness --- that same stuff that makes us
aware that we are aware of a sense of a personal identity, the thing that we
have when we're awake and lose when we are in dreamless sleep, the entirety
of our mental being, our ultimate private "I" --- was considered totally
taboo in scientific circles. So taboo in fact that if some scientists did
dare to broach the subject seriously, they were considered to have gone soft
in the head. Not only that, philosophers who discussed it were labelled
"idealists" as opposed to the Materialists".
Yet the amazing thing is, the
belief was based on a complete absurdity because everyone -- including
scientists who denied the existence of consciousness --- were all conscious
that they were conscious. They knew it, we knew it, everyone knew it.
Otherwise we'd only be a bunch of unconscious androids -- automatons created
from biological materials without minds or any subjective inner experiences.
Therefore, sanity had to return at some time and when it did towards the end
of the last century, a lot of behavioural researchers started working,
studying or teaching at institutes exclusively for consciousness studies.
Their result are awkwardly trickling in now.
Mercifully, they don't deny consciousness any longer but consider it merely,
or mainly, an epiphenomenon. The reason is because a lot of mental states
can be traced to specific physical activates in the brain--thanks to
functional MRI machines that can look into nerve cells even as they are
firing. They also like to compare it to the concept of temperature which, of
course, no one can deny exists, but temperature depends entirely on how fast
or slow molecules move to create more or less of heat. In other words, no
movement of molecules, no temperature. Thus, no brains, no consciousness.
It sort of gives scientists
temporary reprieve without losing face. At the same, not a lot of people are
buying this solution wholesale. Feeling pain, or seeing red, they say, is
not the same thing as the firing of some particular neurons. Neurologists
call it the "hard problem". that is, they still lack an explanation why pain
and other mental states should feel as they do; how something so subjective
arises from something so substantial. But guess what's the latest taboo
these days ? The soul! Give science another 50 years to come to terms with
that too. |
