Here is a review by Kit Wilson -- actually more than a review, a summary -- of Michael Pollan's new book A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. I definitely recommend that you read it. I'm not going to try to summarize the summary.
But I will take the occasion to out myself. As much as I'm a committed skeptic, rationalist, and scientist, I have never been satisfied with claims that the phenomenon of consciousness -- our experience, our awareness of self and the world, our feelings and desires -- can be reduced to the observable and measurable processes of neurology. We do not understand where the universe comes from, why it is what it is, or most of how it works. We know a lot more than we did 100 or 200 years ago, but that has just proved to us how much more we don't know.
I have difficulty finding the words to explain what I believe -- that is if I actually believe anything about this. What I do believe is that it's a mystery that the methods, logic, rules of evidence that we regard as the scientific enterprise cannot solve. There is another level of reality, a property of the universe that can only be investigated and understood, if at all, by other means.
No, we don't get to fill in the blank with God or any other sort of mystical belief. What I am saying is that we don't know, but there has to be more to it than physicists or cosmologists can discover with the methods currently available to them. Maybe I have some ideas but I'll leave it at that for now.
1 comment:
Bravo!
As my dear friend Betty Lynch once said to me, smiling with acceptance, "It's a mystery! We're not meant to understand."
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