Visualizing the physical source of consciousness.
Human Connectome Project - Harvard
A review of Donald Hoffman’s, Case Against Reality,
Chapter 1, Mystery - The scalpel that split consciousness
Hoffman begins by telling us about Joseph Bogen and Philip Vogel who in 1962 pioneered “corpus callosotomy” a procedure that sliced through the brain’s corpus callosum, which runs between the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s done to short circuit the neural feedback loop that triggers extreme epileptic fits.
Then onto the Helmholtz Club, a small group of neurosurgeons, cognitive scientists, and philosophers that met to,
DH: “explore how advances in neuroscience might spawn a scientific theory of consciousness.” (¶7)
DH: “The mystery of consciousness, which was the focus of the Helmholtz Club … is quite simply the mystery of who we are. Your body, like other objects, has physical attributes such as position, mass, and velocity… (just like a rock)” (¶7)
DH: “Like a rock, we have bona fide physical properties. But, unlike a rock, we have conscious experiences and propositional attitudes. Are these also physical. If so, it’s not obvious” (¶10)
DH: “So, what kind of creature are you? How is your body related to your conscious experiences and propositional attitudes? How is your experience of a chai latte related to activities in the brain? Are you just a biochemical machine? (¶11)
“Just a biological machine”? What does that mean? What’s Hoffman trying to imply? What’s Hoffman expecting?
What’s wrong with inhabiting the most amazing biological creature that the pageant of Evolution has ever produced?
