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- Sigmund Freud wrote that “there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego.”
- Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists.
- The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything.
- This dilemma has left ajar a door through which writers and philosophers have stepped. The classic thought experiment to determine whether another being is in possession of consciousness was proposed by Thomas Nagel, a philosopher, in a famous 1974 paper, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” He argued that if “there is something that it is like to be a bat”—if there is any subjective dimension to bat experience—then a bat possesses consciousness. He went on to suggest that this “what it is like” quality may not be reducible to material terms. Ever.
- Whether or not Nagel’s right about that is the biggest argument going in the field of consciousness studies. The question at its heart is often referred to as “the hard problem” or the “explanatory gap”: How do you explain mind—the subjective quality of experience—in terms of meat, that is, in terms of the physical structures or chemistry of the brain?
- The question assumes, as most (but not all) scientists do, that consciousness is a product of brains and that it will eventually be explained as the epiphenomenon of material things like neurons and brain structures, chemicals and communications networks. That would certainly seem to be the most parsimonious hypothesis. Yet it is a long way from being proven, and a number of neuroscientists question whether it ever will be: whether something as elusive as subjective experience—what it feels like to be you—will ever yield to the reductions of science.
References
- Pollan, Micheal. (2018). How to Change Your Mind What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Location 4018). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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