Consciousness and the Soul Solved

Even atheists have souls, Nicholas Humphrey might jest in a book both difficult and fluidly written. In Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness he believes the soul can be explained along with the hard problem of consciousness.

Who's In Charge?: Did Your Neurons Really Make You Do It?

Free will or no free will? Benjamin Libet, John Dylan Haaynes, and so many others have weighed in on the issue. Now we have a new point of view based on new evidence. "Many neuroscientists have maintained a long-standing opinion that what we experience as free will is no more than mechanistic patterns of neurons firing in the brain. Although we feel like free agents contemplating and choosing, they would argue that these sensations are merely an emotional remnant that brain activity leaves in its wake. If these neuroscientists are right, then free will isn’t worth much discussion.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, professor and director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California at Santa Barbara, seriously disagrees.

Neuroscience provides more and more evidence for a mechanistic view of the human mind. A lot of people find that bleak and they don’t like it.Once you learn how the machine works, does that mean that you’re not responsible for your actions because your behavior may be determined? No, I don’t think it means that at all, says Gazzaniga.MoreSubscribe in a reader

How Will Brain Science Change The Legal System?

  If you were to lose the tip of your little finger in an accident, you’d be saddened, but your conscious experience would be no different. By contrast, if you were to damage an equivalently sized piece of brain tissue, this can change your capacity to understand music, name animals, see colors, judge risk, make decisions, send signals to your muscles, use verbs or perform any of the other hidden, daily feats that we pull off seemingly without effort.

Thousands of natural experiments with brain tumors, degenerative disorders, genetic mutations, drug addictions and traumatic brain injury have taught a simple lesson: our hopes, ideas, desires and behaviors depend directly on the state of the enigmatic lump of thinking stuff.

Thomas Metzinger: What Is Behind Our Talk About The Self

Here is an excerpt of an interview between Ginger Campbell, MD, and Thomas Metzinger, PhD, author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self

Dr. Campbell: I guess I was really wanting to start with the working definition that you gave in your book. Why in the book did you pick the phrase “consciousness is the appearance of a world” as your working definition? I’m going to assume it’s a working definition, since that’s the way you defined it in the book.

Dr. Metzinger: For a popular accessible book I needed a simple working definition—and “the appearance of a world” is just that. It happens when you wake up in the morning: a world appears to you.