Pot Pourri--Chance, Consciousness, AI, Fate, Free Will--Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Roger Penrose, Peter Lynds

Black swans. A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are. Our minds are designed to retain, for efficient storage, past information that fits into a compressed narrative. This distortion, called the hindsight bias, prevents us from adequately learning from the past.

Notes from "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from The Biology of Consciousness," by Alva Noë

Are you your brain, or something else?


In this book Alva Noë presents his well-informed view of modern thinking and research on consciousness and the brain. He does not subscribe to the mainstream consensus.

Randomness or Purpose In The Universe?

"Despite the noisy atheists, two trends in spirituality and science have started to converge. One is the trend to seek God outside the church. This has given rise to a kind of spirituality based on personal experience, with an openness to accept Eastern traditions like meditation and yoga as legitimate ways to expand one's consciousness. . . .

We are conscious beings who live with purpose and meaning. It seems unlikely that these arose form a random, meaningless universe. The final answer to where they came from may shake science to its core. I certainly hope it does." More

Neurons: Necessary But Not Sufficient For Consciousness

For the advance of human knowledge, science is based on paradigms, as observed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolution. By paradigm, he meant a conceptual lens, a worldview, that helps us explain what we observe.  Kuhn pointed out that while paradigms allow advancement of knowledge they also exclude other ways of looking at the world--ways that can also yield understanding.

A vantage point thousands of years old is currently discounted by scientists, except for perhaps those quantum physicists who have sought elsewhere to explain phenomena such as the wave function collapse. Erwin Schrödinger comes to mind as one of them. He could make no sense of the collapse unless consciousness somehow participated in observation. "Some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism," he said, but for him, so be it.

Are we governed by unconscious processes?: David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis

 First point, then counterpoint.

POINT. As much as we like to think about the body and mind living separate existences, the mental is not separable from the physical. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change.

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.

David Brooks on The Brain & The Need For Companionship

The thesis of David Brooks' The Social Animal "can be stated simply: who we are is largely determined by the hidden workings of our unconscious minds. Everything we do in life—the careers we choose; even, on a deeper level, the way we experience and perceive the sensation of being alive—emerges from an infinitely complex neuronal network sending out signals (Brooks calls them 'scouts') that, largely unknown to us, assess and determine our behavior. Insights, information, responses to stimuli are governed by our emotions, a rich repository of thoughts and feelings that courses just beneath the surface of our conscious minds. They are 'mental sensations that happen to us.' . . .

. . . Brooks has written the book in the form of a novel, following an imaginary couple named Harold and Erica from womb to tomb. . . . It doesn’t quite work as fiction, but the plot is just scaffolding designed to elucidate Brooks’s real preoccupation: how Erica and Harold came to be who they are. . . .

In essence, The Social Animal is a book about the human need for connection, friendship, love. . . .

. . . You learn the importance of culture, of history—some of the deep knowledge that comes from Plato and Aristotle. Philosophy and theology are telling us less than they used to. Scientists and researchers are leaping in where these disciplines atrophy—they’re all drilling down into an explanation of what man is'.” More
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My comments: What man is? Hmmm. Explaining that would take more than Brooks and his neuroscientists. What man does? Yes. Why man does it? Sometimes, yes. What he is? No. For starters, they might try explaining what consciousness is, and without the usual dodges--an epiphenomenon of the brain, etc.

The book provides a wide audience an approach to a difficult discipline. I respect Brooks for his capable intelligence. He observes that the findings of modern science indicate 18th Century empiricist David Hume had it right as distinct from Descartes in the Frenchman's rationalist approach to mind. As a popularizer, Brooks makes a weighty subject accessible to the public. In an interview with Charlie Rose he stated he wanted to write a book about neuroscience and human behavior that avoided words such as "amygdala". Expect journalism, not scholarship. I do not mean anything pejorative by that.

Brooks does not insist that we are creatures of our neurons--things determined by matter. He believes in a bounded kind of free will in which we can choose environments that will determine us, be it enlistment in the Marines, or enrollment at University of California, Berkeley. As for changing ourselves, he likes an element of Alcoholics Anonymous' 12-Step Program--"fake it until you make it."

Brooks allows that he thinks in the concrete, not in the abstract, and for that reason he chose fictional characters Harold and Erica as an allegory for what he found in his studies. Contrary to reviewer descriptions, Brooks calls his book an allegory, and distinguishes it from a novel. Although not based on Rousseau's Emile, the book finds an influence there.

Seeing Is Not Believing

"From 1992 through 1995, I taught several seminars on reality and consciousness according to quantum theory for humanities undergraduates at the University of Virginia. These seminars attempted to outline in an understandable way to the nonscientist the reasons why consciousness is a necessary part of the most widely accepted interpretations of quantum theory. For these seminars, I wrote concise but complete notes which I handed out to my students, and which summarized the salient points in order to make as clear as possible the scientific basis for the seminar. A revised and refined version of these notes comprises Part 1 of this work. . . .

Because this course makes many statements, the reader might think that it comprises a new belief system, either to be adopted or rejected. However, that is not my intention nor is it the intention of the sages of nonduality who are quoted and discussed. Beliefs are not understanding in themselves--they can actually be obstructions to understanding. Because Reality cannot be described in words, the words are meant to be used as pointers to Reality rather than as descriptors of Reality. Hence, this is a course in seeing, not in believing." More

Once More: The Hard Problem of Consciousness Revisited (My Brain Is Starting To Hurt. Or, Is It MY Brain?)

What follows is not merely idle speculation. It is a core problem of neurophilosophy as neuroscience searches for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC).

Causal closure is what it's all about. How can a cause, brain matter, produce consciousness as some kind of physical phenomenon? How is my delight in the exquisite beauty of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata a physical phenomenon? How can you explain as physical phenomena what it feels like to be you? How is all that a physical effect from a physical cause, which philosophically would be physical monism? If we don't accept monism we are thrown back to dualism with its two things, some kind of (1) ghost in this (2) machine we call the body.

Put it differently and in grammatic conjugation: How do we get from the first person, "I," and how I live my life to the third person, where all is an object related to me, including my consciousness? How does this sense of being me get rendered so that it can be discussed in the third person? Can it ever be rendered thus?

For some time I have believed that the way out of this problem is to view the world as also containing consciousness. One way to think about it is this: Just as some quantum phenomena are up quarks or down quarks, or photon particles, so others could be consciousness phenomena.

As conjecture, this is not a great leap. We find that non-locality operates at the quantum level. That is, across great distances, photons, for example, can "talk" to one another so they change polarity as they speed toward a target. This is what Einstein would call "spooky action at a distance" but this quantum entanglement is nonetheless a proven case. So, too, perhaps, this is the case with consciousness as non-local. I find that Galen Strawson has a view that would be sympathetic to mine. Read on.

"The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this. According to one, the hard problem is actually very easy: the answer is that consciousness ‘emerges’ from neural processes. This succeeds in replacing ‘what is consciousness and how is it possible?’ with ‘what is emergence and how is it possible?’ But it doesn’t seem to get much further; many find it less than satisfactory. According to the other view, the hard problem is so hard that it can’t be real: consciousness must be some sort of illusion. Many of this persuasion tried hard to convince themselves that they are, in fact, not conscious, but few of them succeeded. Centuries ago, Descartes suggested, plausibly, that the attempt is self-defeating.

There is, I should add, another way to respond to the hard problem. One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter after all; there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness resides in that. Notoriously, however, this view has hard problems of its own." More

Theodore Dalrymple: And So, Why Do You Behave Like That?

Let me see, first there was Freud, who would launch people into a new world of self-understanding. He is now passé. I recall a book by behaviorist B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he claimed that both are illusory attributes and the sooner we stop believing in them the better. Skinner was a highly respected public and academic intellectual in his day, but his ideas have faded into the background.

Of course, there was also the Steady State Theory of the universe's origin. Then along came the Big Bang. Way back when, there was the ether. A brainy Swiss patent-office examiner put that one to rest. What else? The patent-office examiner said God does not play dice with the universe, but quantum physics revealed that apparently He does. With breakthroughs in quantum physics, humankind was headed for brave new horizons. Then that cussed wave form collapse could not be understood and Heisenberg had to formulate his Uncertainty Principle. More recently, we have string theory, which presently is hanging by a thread for many.

Ah, but don't despair. A bold new group of men and women has emerged. They are highly confident they will find the answer about consciousness. Trumpet fanfare and drum roll, please. Enter: neuroscientists and neurophilosophers who will explain why you feel like you.

Theodore Dalrymple sees this kind of confidence as more than bothersome. Consider the issues of free will, the self, the soul, and human nature. Neuroscience and neurophilosophy have staked out the turf on these topics, and certainly it is turf that will unsettle the public mind, undermine the common weal. Some of the findings will have profound and unsettling implications for individuals and societies, in part because of public misconceptions, in part because researchers make arrogant claims without concern for religious as well as ethical and moral implications for societies and people. If neuroscience teaches us anything, it is that human beings are not ruled by reason.

Dalrymple attended a neuroscience conference and found great optimism toward unraveling the mysteries of consciousness and the brain. He does not seem especially impressed. More

V.S. Ramachandran: Consciousness, Qualia, & Self

Ramachandran has an ability to open up access to difficult subjects--not that he explains them away, but that he, well, he makes them more accessible to understanding. He has great stories about some of his patients, one being the son who, after an auto accident, called his mother an imposter when he saw her, but immediately warmed to her when he talked to her on the phone. (That is not part of this video. It is called the Capgras Delusion and can be watched here.)

Some of his talking points:

• What is consciousness? He and his colleagues want to understand the logic of consciousness. There are two important problems regarding it:
  
• One is qualia. Francis Crick and Kristof Koch championed the view that it is sensations you're conscious of. (My opinion: this seems tautological. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain in the third person what we all experience in the first person.)
• The qualia problem: You cannot communicate your experience of green to anybody else.
• The second problem is that of self. Not only do you experience qualia but you know that you experience qualia and you know that you know that you experience qualia.
• There is no such thing as a free-floating qualia without a self and there is no such thing as a self without a qualia.
• Ramachandran: The two co-evolved in evolution and are intimately linked to language. Self and qualia are two sides of a Möbius strip.
  

Antonio Damasio: How Can Somebody Be Both Awake and Not Awake?

In Descartes' Error (1994), neurologist Antonio Damasio argued that we should not try to treat reason and emotion as separate. Rather, both are essential to decision-making. Our choices are not wholly rational.

The classical dichotomy is of head and heart, reason and emotions. Good decisions, according to classical thinking result from good reasoning. Instead, Damasio says good rational decisions depend on feelings.

His patient, Elliot, had prefrontal damage, and was smart, pleasant, and engaging. He scored normal on a battery of personality tests. Yet he made horrible, life-ruining decisions. Why? Because his intellectual capacity was severed from his emotions, so to speak.

In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), Damasio takes a different argument--that the key to consciousness lies with the body's ability to sense and react to its own processes and its environment. The problem of consciousness, he maintains, has two related components. One is the question of how the "out there," the outside world, finds a parallel imagery in the brain. The other is how a sense of self arises from a "map" that correlates inside with outside.

He gains his theory from practice. His examples derive from real people with serious problems, He wants to understand how we know things about the world through our senses and also how at the same time we are aware of a self experiencing things. This is part of what he calls "the feeling of what happens."

In dealing with patients with brain damage, he developed insight into questions he had. As Damasio puzzled over effects to a patient's brain during an epileptic seizure, he sought an answer to a classic question among scientists and philosophers: What is it about the human brain and its networks of neurons that give rise to consciousness?

In The Feeling of What Happens he concludes that consciousness is layered. At its base lies a vague, animalian sense of self arising from the brain's "diagram" of the body. This proto-self props up the higher layers.

Even snails, have proto-selves, says Damasio, but they aren't really conscious. As to the seat of consciousness, the brain is a parallel processor, designed with redundant neuron networks. No single region of the brain has the seat of consciousness. Consciousness, he says,"is the feeling of knowing that we have feelings."

If his theory gains from practice, his practice was frought with troubled questions over real people. When young, he had a patient who was both there and not there, both conscious and not conscious. The man's consciousness became so empty that he could not respond to his name. At the same time, he recognized a cup of coffee and picked it up to drink it.

"This incident occurred more than three decades ago, when Dr. Antonio Damasio was a medical student in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has never forgotten it. How was it possible, he wondered, for someone to be there and yet not be there, to be awake and yet not be awake, to be aware of his surroundings and at the same time be oblivious to them?" More

Chaos Theory and Avalanches: Your Brain Is Like A Pile of Sand

So you think your thoughts, you say? Well, if you do, what will you think thirty seconds from now? One minute from now? One hour? Where is this thinker you claim yourself to be?

What about space? You know what that is, right? Show me space. You are wrong if you say it is that which is occupied by the chair, the wall, and your computer monitor. They occur in relationships and are put in something termed space to explain the relationships. In fact, pure space is an illusion. What you call space is instead a sense impression used to filter the relationship of objects.*

When you think about it, you realize that many of our intuitions about the world are only a way for us to make sense out of it so we can get along within it. Making sense out of it is not the same as the way things are within it.

So when I say that the brain--your thoughts, your reason--works in a kind of chaos, don't dismiss the idea out of hand.

Formulated by Edward Lorenz in his study of weather patterns, then applied to population growth by Robert May, and later developed into the fractal geometry of nature by Benoit Mandelbrot, Chaos Theory now has entered the field of neuroscience.

According to those who apply the theory to consciousness, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Moreover, disorder is essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

"In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence."

When sand piles reach a certain height and mass, they unpredictably begin to avalanche. "The brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable." More

*Einstein folded Newton's classical space and time into curved spacetime.

Are You What You Think You Are?

"If consciousness is only an illusion, it's the greatest mistake human beings have ever made."

Gerald Edelman—"together with Patricia and Paul Churchland, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, and Francis Crick, to name only the most well-known—have suddenly thrust onto center stage an unsettling series of solutions to the mystery of human self-awareness, our subjective experience of being alive and personal, of the divine spark, if you will.

These solutions are far from unanimous in their details, but they are all agreed on one very basic point: What we call 'consciousness' is purely a material process. Consciousness is not the evidence of a 'mind' substance as apart from 'body' substance; still less is 'consciousness' the activity of a spirit or soul inside our physical bodies. 'We are at the beginning of the neuroscientific revolution,' Edelman buoyantly declares, 'a prelude to the largest possible scientific revolution, one with inevitable and important social consequences.' . . .

More troubling are the implications for ethics and action posed by the consciousness studies. Gerald Edelman, with what sounds like real anguish, warns that 'under present machine models of the mind,' questions of ethics and morals become 'a problem of major proportions, for under such models it is easy to reject a human being or to exploit a person as simply another machine.' " More

Ants, Epiphenomalism, & Collective Intelligence

Is human consciousness an epiphenomenon? That is, does it evolve out of the physical, of which matter is the primary phenomenon? If so, it is an emergent property. To be sure, the brain can cause ideas, but ideas cannot cause a brain. Belief in epiphenomenism leads to disbelief in free will, for ideas cannot affect matter. You and I, our thoughts, our beliefs, our volition, are caused by the physical. In other words, you ain't nothin' but a hunk of dust.

Here is a different approach to the same question:

"Put a hundred army ants on a flat surface and they will walk around in never decreasing circles until they die from exhaustion. But a colony of a million army ants is a sophisticated 'super-organism.' The colony carries out its legendary raids and can even keep nest temperatures constant to within a degree. An army ant colony seems endowed with an intelligence far beyond that of any individual ant. N.R.Franks speculates thus:

'It seems that intelligence, natural or artificial, is an emergent property of collective communication. Human consciousness itself may be an epiphenomenon of extraordinary processing power. Although experts prefer to avoid simplistic definitions of intelligence, it seems clear that all intelligence involves the rational manipulation of symbolic information. This is exactly what happens when army ants pass information from individual to individual through the 'writing' and 'reading' of symbols, often in the form of chemical messengers or trail pheromones, which act as stimuli for changing behavior patterns.' " More

On the other hand, Stuart Hameroff has an argument against consciousness as an epiphenomenon: “. . . evidence suggests backwards time effects occur in the brain. Quantum entanglement apparently depends on seemingly backward time effects which, as unconscious quantum information, can potentially rescue consciousness from the unfortunate position of illusory epiphenomenon.” (Found here.) For a quicker read of Hameroff and Roger Penrose, in which consciousness is not characterized "as epiphenomenon, but as [an] intrinsic component of the universe" click on this. Also find Hameroff in the left sidebar of Mind Shadows.

From DNA & Consciousness to Snorts, Sighs, & Happiness

All DNA does is unzip into another form: here is a genetic/cellular argument that nothing dies, nor is born, and all is part of one life. There is only one life, and it is shared by all human beings.

So you are bored? Try Studies on Consciousness, Cognition, and Life. Take your pick: The nature of consciousness; the nature of Mind; the philosophy of mind; Neurobiology, Theoretical physics.

"Human history can be understood as a long, unbroken sequence of snorts and sighs and other self-modifications of our mental states." Love? Ambition? Heroism? And you thought there was something noble in it? (I still do.)

A grab bag of books on happiness revealed this statement: "A full forty percent of the capacity for happiness is within your power to change." Really? And on what verifiable data is this statement based? Sounds more like an academic version of Oprah Winfrey to me.

Steven Pinker on Consciousness and Pulling The Plug

To dictate his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death, Jean-Dominique Bauby used his eyelid to signal the words to his typist. That was all the communication he had available. In December of 1995, at 43, the editor in chief of France's Elle magazine suffered a stroke which severely damaged his brain stem. After several weeks in a coma, he woke to find that he was one of the rare victims of a condition called Locked-In Syndrome" or LIS, which had left his mind functioning but his body almost completely shut down. He was in a coma for weeks and then awakened to find that he understood others but could not communicate with them--almost. His mind functioned as usual but his body was completely paralyzed--except for one eyelid. The book was made into a profound and deeply engrossing movie. After finishing his book, Bauby died in 1997.

Consider, then, this situation as described by Steven Pinker. It is not LIS, but a condition called Persistent Vegetative State. Here is a woman whose brain was more profoundly injured than Bauby's, yet it reflected consciousness of events going on around her. Was there an "I" in her mind, aware of all that was going on but unable to communicate?:

"The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness."

Pinker says this about her condition: "Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?" More

Consciousness (Not) Explained

For most of us, our emotions are stirred, powerful feelings arise, and that is what we are likely to remember.

"Bill Noonan hasn't suffered any obvious physical damage to his brain. Yet for more than two decades after his return from Vietnam, he has re-experienced the most terrifying event of his life several times a week as a waking dream. 'It was a night ambush,' he remembers. 'The first seven guys to my right were machine-gunned down. My gas mask was shot right off my hip. That was my first fire fight.' Bill knew his flashbacks weren't real-but they seemed so real that it made no difference. 'I didn't know what was happening,' he says. 'The biggest fear I had was that I was crazy. ' "

Not so, all of us. Far from traumatic experiences, Marcel Proust sought a kind of metaphysics in memory. He found his most meaningful events in the taste of a cookie, or the angle of his feet while he gazed at a building. "The past," he wrote, "still lives in us . . . has made us what we are and is remaking us every moment!" He says, "it is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, places and climates! . . . So we hold within us a treasure of impressions . . . that become certain moments of our past." (Formerly Remembrance of Things Past, now In Search of Lost Time.)

In either case, Proust's or Noonan's, the mind is the mystery. It is the source of our sense of self, our sense of being in the world, our sense of choice. Some say it is merely a function of consciousness, which in turn arises from the brain, an emergent phenomenon, physical at its root. Others argue that to insist on only the physicality is to deny a spiritual aspect to our lives.

Long before Descartes came up with his "I think, therefore I am," Buddha had said, in effect, "I am, therefore I think." Consciousness itself remains a mystery, arising as Eastern sages say, out of the great I AM.

In the West, science hopes to explain much of it. Nonetheless, as they study it, they understand that the victims of mental disease or brain damage provide "stark demonstrations of how fragile reality can be. Most people agree, within limits, on the objective character of the world around them. Yet while the victims of mental disorders are certainly conscious and aware, their worlds are profoundly different from those of most of us." More

Antonio Damasio: Consciousness Is Not Beyond The Reach of Human Intelligence

Yesterday's post had Colin McGinn, in which he asserted that the gap between brain and mind will never be bridged. Not so says Antonio Damasio, who believes that we have the rational ability to understand consciousness in its relationship to the brain.

Damasio has written Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Noted for his hypothesis on somatic markers. Damasio argues that all decision-making involves an emotional component. In fact, when faced with alternatives of high uncertainty and ambiguity, our cognitive processes can become overloaded. At such times, somatic markers can kick in to help us. These markers are chemically stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and provide us associations to help influence our decisions.

As for his view on consciousness, he believes that we should not regard it as an enduring mystery. "Some philosophers maintain that solving the problem of consciousness is beyond the reach of human intelligence. This is very odd and, I believe, untrue. It fits a sensible intuition that the mind is something special and different, separable from the brain, but the fact that the intuition is sensible does not make it right." More

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