Peter Russell On Consciousness

When he is not attending or conducting seminars somewhere on the globe, or not acting as consultant to businesses seeking new ways to think, Peter Russell, a Brit, lives on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, across the bay from San Francisco. At Cambridge he studied mathematics and theoretical physics under the supervision of Stephen Hawking. He has published several "consciousness-raising" books, among them The White Hole In Time. He has a website where statements such as this can be read:

"The one thing we know for sure is that we are experiencing beings. Yet the one thing that science cannot explain is the fact that we are conscious. Do we need a new paradigm?"

"The really hard problem is consciousness itself. Why should the complex processing of information in the brain lead to an inner experience? Why doesn't it all go on in the dark, without any subjective aspect? Why do we have any inner life at all?

I now believe this is not so much a hard problem as an impossible problem–impossible, that is, within the current scientific worldview. Our inability to account for consciousness is the trigger that will, in time, push Western science into what the American philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, called a 'paradigm shift'." More