A team of English philosophers has launched a three-year research project to explore conscious experiences that science still cannot explain.
Funded through Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and involving the collaboration of some of the world’s leading philosophers and cognitive scientists, the project will attempt to answer the mystery of consciousness.
“When we see a sunset or hear a symphony our sense organs, brains and bodies are moved in ways that are well understood by the physical and biological sciences,” Professor Paul Coates of the University of Hertfordshire told ScienceDaily. “But during such experiences we also enjoy distinctive forms of conscious awareness. Yet this undeniable fact about our conscious lives is stubbornly resistant to scientific understanding.
“How is it even possible for purely physical brain activity to produce conscious experience?” he went on. “How do the qualities that manifest themselves in experience relate to the very different properties that are referred to in scientific descriptions of the physical world?”
To find the answers, Coates and a scientific team will re-examine fundamental concepts relating to consciousness and physical reality. They say they will examine experimental results in psychology and brain science as well as phenomenology and other forms of philosophical enquiry.
2 comments:
“How is it even possible for purely physical brain activity to produce conscious experience?” I would flip the question: How is it possible for consciousness to produce physical brain activity? I think that question is more true to our situation than the former. I appreciate science, having been trained within that realm, performed experiments and published within peer-reviewed journals. It has its place. But science has painted itself into a corner stance by starting off with a premise of mind-body split. That of course occurs by taking the slab of meat, as marvelous as it is, as the starting point -- a decision that has and will yield fruit but leads one to ask zen koan-like questions which can only be resolved phenomenologically. These researchers may get continuous funding because their investigations using "scientific" methods will never come to a conclusion. Anyhoo, that's some of my thoughts on the matter.
Thank you for posting this, Gregory. I appreciate their studies and also appreciate that the pursuit of understanding through the Aristotelian logic of science runs a very different course than the opening to understanding via Plato and Hermes and Ibn 'Arabi and others of the so-called "mystic" disciplines.
Thank you for your comment, George. What I think I see happening on several fronts ~ at least I hope so ~ is the most aggressive movement by scientists since the 18th century to reconcile Science with the mysteries it heretofore discounted. And you couldn't be more correct in your statement regarding the mind-body wrestling match.
If we must throw our support to one side or the other, I, like you, will opt for the Platonic/Hermetic/Sufi/Zen view and all that it encompasses.
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