What is consciousness ?

In sci­ence, plen­ty of prob­lems are hard. But per­haps just one is so grue­somely try­ing that sci­en­tists them­selves have termed it, well, “the hard prob­lem.” How does con­scious­ness arise—the liv­ing, aware ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing?Some the­o­ries hold that it comes from, or is even iden­ti­cal to, elec­tri­cal and chem­i­cal pro­cesses known to un­fold in the brain. Oth­ers say it arises else­where: in some even sub­tler, yet-un­dis­cov­ered brain pro­cesses, or per­haps a mind-stuff quite dis­tinct from the brain—some call it a soul.Few on ei­ther side claim to have fi­nal an­swers. But they of­ten ar­gue pas­sion­ately over who’s at least in the right play­ing field.Now a group of re­search­ers has be­gun a study that they say might set­tle the is­sue. “We can ac­tu­ally test this, and put and end to all these de­bates,” said Sam Par­nia, a crit­i­cal care doc­tor at Weill Cor­nell Med­i­cal Cen­ter in New York. Par­nia has spent years stu­dying re­ports that some car­di­ac-ar­rest pa­tients keep hav­ing clear, dis­tinct thought pro­cesses af­ter they’re clin­ic­ally dead and de­tect­a­ble brain ac­ti­vity has ceased.

Pa­tients com­monly re­count these men­tal ex­pe­ri­ences, which of­ten in­clude see­ing a light at the end of a tun­nel, af­ter be­ing re­vived.Parnia and colleagues aim to put these re­ports to a test: spe­cif­ic sounds will be played to such pa­tients, and they’ll be asked to re­call the sounds af­ter re­viv­ing. If they do, it would con­firm the ac­counts of thoughts with­out brain ac­ti­vity—sup­port­ing the claims that “con­scious­ness is a sep­a­rate, yet un­disco­vered sci­en­tif­ic ent­ity” from the brain, Par­nia wrote in a pa­per in the the April 23 ad­vance on­line edi­tion of the re­search jour­nal Med­i­cal Hy­pothe­ses.The study “looks like an in­ter­est­ing pro­pos­al,” wrote Da­vid Chal­mers, a phi­los­o­pher and di­rec­tor of the Cen­tre for Con­scious­ness at the Aus­tral­ian Na­tional Un­ivers­ity in Can­ber­ra, Aus­tral­ia, in an e­mail. If the claims are con­firmed, it would “pose an in­ter­est­ing chal­lenge for sci­en­tists to ex­plain,” re­marked Chal­mers, au­thor of sev­er­al books on con­scious­ness.

View: Full Article | Source: World Science