“I wonder why, I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. “
“I wonder why, I wonder why. / I wonder why I wonder. /
I wonder why I wonder why / I wonder why I wonder!”
Research on the brain, mind, and consciousness was given a significant boost by Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Crick in 1994,
when he wrote in his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis, “that ‘you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your
ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of
nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
This is what is called “the hard problem”—explaining how billions of neurons swapping chemicals give rise to such subjective experiences as consciousness, self-awareness, and awareness that others are conscious and selfaware; that is, not only the ability to wonder, but the ability to wonder why we wonder, and even onder why others wonder why….
Explaining each of the functional parts of the brain is the easy problem, such as the differences between waking and sleep, discrimination of stimuli, or the control of behavior. By contrast, what has come to be known as the hard problem in consciousness studies is experience: what it is like to be in a given mental state? Adding up all of the solved easy problems does not equal a solution to the hard problem. Something else is going on in private subjective experiences—called qualia—and there is no consensus on what it is.
Dualists hold that qualia are separate from physical objects in the world and that mind is more than brain. Materialists contend that qualia are ultimately explicable through the activities of neurons and that mind and brain are one.
What do you think…?