Exploring how science is unraveling philosophy’s eccentric Hard Problem, with some help from Professor Nick Lane.
David Chalmers leads philosophers who claim scientists, (that is people dedicated to studying physical reality), will never figure out how biological processes can produce subjective experience without adapting some woo.
Then they go on to talk about studying “consciousness” by focusing on neurons and the brain. While the body gets lost like some kind of externality, an irrelevance to minimize and avoid.
Now please consider for a moment, your brain is intimately connected down to every cubic millimeter of your body. Your living body is about a nonstop exchange of information and resources between itself and the outside world. (Same as all other animals, down to single celled creatures.)
It is your body that experiences the bike ride, it is your mouth, nose, fingers, etc. who are experiencing the food being eaten, same with the child or lover being touched — it is not your brain.
Everything your brain has to work with, must be processed and communicated via our individual living body, (with its unique perceptual filters — product of nature via nurture.)
Nick Lane uses the metaphor of our body’s biology and organs, as a full set of orchestra instruments, the physical biology scientists have been studying. Nick suggests it’s time to listen to the music they make. The bioelectrical rhythms and fluctuating fields that convey what those biological instruments are performing.
The brain? That’s the conductor, and the music that’s the thoughts and feeling surging through our bodies. At the end of this article I’ve added a 266 word quote from Dr. Lane, who does a superb job of conveying the concept.
