Consciousness

A FEATURE ON CONSCIOUSNESS THAT FIRST APPEARED IN THE TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT. IT WAS WRITTEN AFTER I'D MADE A FILM ON THE TOPIC FEATURING PROFESSOR SUSAN GREENFIELD, ROGER POENROSE, GALEN STRAWSON AND OTHERS.


The American writer Tom Wolfe warned recently that: "The opening of the 21st century may see man proclaim the death of the soul."

Wolfe, best known these days as a novelist, was echoing Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God" a century ago, to suggest that we're entering an era when science would attempt a total explanation of the human condition - with no place for a spiritual dimension.

The idea is that man is essentially a super sophisticated soft machine, an accident of genetics and natural selection, powered by a mind created from a complex electrochemical slush in the brain.

How close are we to this big picture? The mapping of the human genome is nearing completion - offering a giant leap forward in understanding out biological geography and history. But there are several knotty problems that still need unravelling.

And across the world scientists are chasing after an answer to the biggest one of all - a defining enigma at the heart of our existence - the nature of consciousness.

What exactly is it they're seeking to understand? What is this mysterious stuff called consciousness by which we know the world and ourselves. It cannot be seen, held, touched or measured. Yet we know we have it.

It is the "I" that experiences the world out there in all its complexity and turns the evidence of the senses into the stuff of self - memories, fears, hopes, anxieties, dreams and more. What translates the feel of a cat's fur, the sound of seagulls or the scent of a rose into something we are consciousness off.

Our senses allow us to experience the "world out there" but what creates the world inside.

In ancient Greece, Plato was convinced the location of this "self" was in the head because it was closest in shape to the ideal geometrical sphere. By Mediaeval times most people believed that the brain was the seat of our minds, but had no idea why. Religious prohibitions on meaningful medical research meant it was left to the philosophers to reason things out.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes crystallised the question in the 17th century when he wrote: "I know that I exist. The question is what is the "I" that I know."

His solution. was "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am.). The consciousness, he suggested, was the only evidence that we actually exist. But it existed separately from the body. Despite the scientific revelations since then the idea of a soul has had en enduring currency.

The mainstream of modern thinking roots it all back in the biological. The controversial American cognitive scientist Dr Stephen Pinker's bestseller: "How The Mind Works". is a massive and influential rumination on our inner workings.

The essence of his argument is that our minds are essentially computers, that this neural computer gives rise to human nature and that it, in turn, was shaped by natural selection.

There's no place in this philosophy for God or the soul. And precious little for the notion of the individual.

The current mainstream of thought on consciousness has been popularised in Britain by Professor Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution. She says:"Consciousness is the essence of the individual. It really represents the final frontier for science."

Greenfield is a brain specialist, with professorships in Oxford and London and an on-going research interest into the links between Alzheimers Disease and Parkinsonism. She roots her ideas about consciousness in neuroscience.

She says: " How do our personalities, our states of consciousness, derive from a grey mass of tissue with the consistency of a soft boiled egg."

From the outside this mushy mass tells us nothing about the individual personality or even their gender. But it inconceivably complex. Each individual's brain has an hundreds of billions of brain cells - or neurons - and the constantly shifting synaptic connections between them outnumber the known particles in the universe.

The brain's workings are a hugely complex and dynamic interaction of chemicals and electrical impulses and the Mind is an emergent property of the brain. So how does it create consciousness?

Greenfield argues that when an event occurs - we see a red rose or hear a piece of music - our brains respond and create our consciousness of this stimuli by coordinating an incredibly complex configuration of electrical impulses and chemical interactions.

She uses the analogy of an infinitely vast symphony orchestra, coming together to work in unique arrays for every singular type of event to create a region of consciousness.

And, meanwhile, there is no evidence of any ghost in the machine coordinating this process - looking out and making sense of the world. Consciousness is something that emerges from this subtle mental interplay.

But the scientific spectrum is wide and one of Britain's greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists Professor Sir Roger Penrose has very different ideas from Greenfield or Pinker. He is clear about the importance of the search and says: "Human consciousness is the deepest question of all. Who are we? What are we doing here? What is existence about? What lies at the heart of it?"

But although he has written three knotty books explaining his ideas, as a theorticale physicist, about what might constitute consciousness, he doubts if we'll find it - since we're no even looking in the right place.

Penrose believes that the essence of mind is likely to be found only when he solve one of the fundamental questions of physics: what can bridge the gap between how the smallest known particles in the universe, the sub-atomic world of quantum physics - and the behaviour of things at a cosmic scale - the bewildering world of black holes, singularities and relativity.

Penrose dismisses the notion of the mind as a computer, but doesn't think that understanding neurobiology will unravel the mystery either. For him the answer may be found only when practical science catches up with his theories.

Testing theories has always been the problem. For centuries, science had no tools to investigate something as evanescent as consciousness and thought - things that cannot be seen and whose only proof of existence has, until recently, been individual testimony? So the issue was left to theologians, philosophers and psychologists.

But now new technologies enable neuroscientists to probe the behaviour of our brains as never before - sophisticated brain scanning machines utilising fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) or PET (positron-emission tomography).

Now it is possible to see neural events as they occur - in effect to watch parts of the brain light up in response to a joke or flinch at pain.

The mechanistic view of the mind as a super sophisticated computer has promptedintensive attempts to create computer neural networks that could have thoughts and feelings. Most neuroscientists see this as a blind alley.

Susan Greenfield says: "The idea is ridiculous. Consciousness entails an interaction between the body and the brain trafficking a myriad of chemicals between the two. To reproduce that, you would have to building a body with a whole range of chemicals and the three dimensionality of the brain would have to be preserved to the very last connection."

But philosophers the bigger venture, of understanding consciousness at all, is also destined to fail. Galen Strawson, for instance, a fellow of Jesus College Oxford says: "There are a lot of things that I think science will not be able to answer and I'm inclined to think that consciousness is something we are just going to have to accept - that matter, as it's arranged in the brain, produces consciousness."

The benefits of understanding consciousness could bring a breakthrough in understanding and controlling conditions such as Alzheimers and Parkinsonism and in gaining a deeper understanding of persistent vegetative states. It could also lead to computers and robots that would be able to work in really valuable ways for mankind

But if we do track consciousness down then Wolfe's fears may be founded. The great American naturalist Edward O Wilson, an expert on ants, sums up the hopes - and fears - of this search. In his book "Human Nature" he wrote: "If the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve cells and the mind can, somehow, be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect. We are biological and our souls cannot fly free."