A Scientist's View of Consciousness

[Guest guest]

An excellent article in Scientific American that touches upon Physics

Nobelist Steven Weinberg's concession that present-day scientific

knowledge does not explain or account for the existence of

consciousness:

 

http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.html

 

Extract: "It is widely believed that physics provides a complete

catalogue of the universe's fundamental features and laws. As

physicist Steven Weinberg puts it in his 1992 book "Dreams of a Final

Theory", the goal of physics is a "theory of everything" from which

all there is to know about the universe can be derived. But Weinberg

concedes that there is a problem with consciousness. Despite the

power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness does not

seem to be derivable from physical laws. He defends physics by

arguing that it might eventually explain what he calls the objective

correlates of consciousness (that is, the neural correlates), but of

course to do this is not to explain consciousness itself. If the

existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a

theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final

theory must contain an additional fundamental component."

 

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[Guest guest]

This is indeed an excellent article. If you read Francis Crick's response

to David Chalmers, you could perhaps sense the two different cultures in

science between the physicists and the biologists. Crick echoes the view

that only in the absence of worked out mechanisms do "hard" or intractable

problems arise. You could also discern the strains of similar arguments as

we have seen in the shashtras, in this article.

 

Vedanta is unique in holding that there are no multiple fundamental

entiities. That is indeed the physicists dream. As rightly pointed out in

this forum, these are not just theories because we are referring to a first

person referential context.

 

Chalmers proposal to include consciousness as a fundamental property is

interesting. He proposes that information has a physical and an

experiential aspect. He struggles with the implication of this with the

ubiquity of information to ask if there is even a rudimentary "awareness" in

a thermostat.

 

I have sometimes wondered about the mythical significance of the story of

Prahlad, where Hiranyakashyapu, strikes at an inert pillar and the Narasimha

avatar appears - is there such a thing as inert and what is the implication

of the immanence of God, or God being the intelligent cause as well as the

material cause.

 

 

----Original Message Follows----

S Jayanarayanan <sjayana

advaitin

advaita-l <advaita-l

CC: advaitin <advaitin>

A Scientist's View of Consciousness

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 17:17:31 -0700 (PDT)

 

An excellent article in Scientific American

http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.html