"Scientists have excorised the ghost from the machine not because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. "
Steven Pinker, Time Magazine Artice.
According to Pinker, the study of consciousness segments into two problems ... what philosopher David Chalmers labels the hard problem and the easy problem.
The easy problem is the study of what separates conscious thoughts (those thoughts you are aware of right this second), and unconscious mental computation (e.g. your brain reminding your heart to beat). The hard problem is understanding why there is first-person subjective experience. A person not only sees green in the grass, they experience it. Its greenness reminds them of other greenness experiences. Reducing one's experience of greenness to neural computation is what cognitive neuroscientists consider the hard problem.
Pinker writes,
Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
What is the astonishing hypothesis?
The term is taken from Dr. Francis Crick's 1994 book about consciousness, , The Scientific Search For The Soul. If Crick's name sounds familiar, it should. He and Watson were co-discoverers of the double helix formation of DNA.
Crick argued that mankind ought to substitute the traditional conceptualizations of the soul with a materialistic understanding of how the brain produces the mind. Crick's hypothesis was that "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them" ... and ... "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules".
In worldview terms, Crick believes that man is a machine. Crick's view reminds me of the expression made famous by artificial intelligence guru, (MIT) Prof Marvin Minsky. Minsky once referred to the human brain "three-pound computer made of meat." Crick's view is that consciousness is produced by the software that runs that meat computer.
Pinker asserts that man-as-a-machine is the dominant [world]view among neuroscientists and that it causes little controversy.
This view is philosophically tangled and ignores some compelling evidence to the contrary. In my next post on this topic, I'll esplain why.
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