Thinking About Not Thinking

"If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions . . . you would think I was in a pretty bad way. If I also claimed that the condition was infectious, you would wish me luck in coping with such a terrible disease, and bid me a hasty farewell."

But hold on! We are talking about sleep. Everybody does it. Everybody agrees it has biological purpose but nobody knows what the purpose is.

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.