Investigating the Biology of Consciousness

Investigating the Biology of Consciousness

Damasio*, Antonio R.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 353, no. 1377 (1998): 1879-1882
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1998.0339

* Professor at University of Southern California & Salk Institute, winner of Golden Brain, Honda, Grawemeyer, etc.

“With a few exceptions to the contrary, consciousness is presumed to be the most complex and impenetrable human property, from which follows that it is the most difficult to define and the most problematic to investigate. For some of those who are preoccupied with investigating the relation between mind and brain—neuroscientists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind—consciousness and mind are one and the same, and, as a result, the intangibility, unapproachability and refractoriness of consciousness are those usually associated with the mind. Some of those investigators ask the following question: how can science approach interior phenomena that can be made available only to a single observer and are thus hopelessly subjective? They answer the question negatively and so it is not surprising to discover that the current discussion on the scientific account of consciousness often aligns itself with one of the following positions:

(i) declare consciousness the supreme scientific mystery and propose that none of it can ever be explained;
(ii) declare consciousness a respectable mystery that will be solvable only when a nearly equivalent mystery, for instance quantum gravity, will yield its own solution and permit us to deal with the issue;
(iii) declare a possible scientific solution in the study of externally observable manifestations of this internal phenomenon, in the hope that the allegedly objective study of a part of the thing will be enough to understand the whole.

For a variety of reasons, none of these defeatist positions is really well founded.”

— Antonio R. Damasio