What Is Consciousness ?

Perhaps not surprisingly, neither scientist nor philosopher has developed a convincing answer to either question beyond Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). In the 1970s, Tulane University biopsychologist Gordon Gallup developed the “mirror test” of self-recognition. If a person or creature recognizes a red dot on his or her forehead in the mirror, the test presumes that the subject is conscious. The mirror test grew out of a modern interpretation of Descartes’ maxim that knowledge of self implies consciousness.

Yet it remains unclear why some animals (e.g., humans, primates, dolphins, magpies) pass the test and most others don’t. Researchers generally believe that there are specific brain centers that are crucial to awakening and that there is probably something about the complexity of the network of electrical connections in the brain that gives rise to consciousness.

How exactly one leads to the other remains a mystery. Trying to distill the subjective human experience from individual parts of the brain has proven an even more futile undertaking. Adherents of a field called “integrated information theory” argue that some systems are too complex to be understood by breaking them into their constituent parts, and certainly the brain is the most complex biological system known to mankind. This theory gets us closer to understanding why conventional approaches can’t explain consciousness, but doesn’t go as far as to explain how consciousness should arise out of complex network effects.

With the failure of classical physics to provide an explanation for consciousness, physicists have proposed that the mind may arise via quantum mechanical processes. (Quantum mechanics is the study of relationships between subatomic particles.) Some interpretations of quantum mechanics imply that the world only takes the order it does when observed by a conscious individual. Conversely, the resolution of the random, quantum universe within very small structures in the brain may itself trigger consciousness.

However, if these structures do exist, scientists have yet to discover them. If the search for consciousness seems hopeless at this point, there may be good reason. University of Miami philosopher Colin McGinn believes that the mind is fundamentally incapable of understanding itself. If true, consciousness will forever remain the ultimate science mystery.

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