Consciousness.
Oliver Sacks grapples with consciousness in the New York Review of Books. (*)
Our understanding of it is not well-developed.
Oliver Sacks grapples with consciousness in the New York Review of Books. (*)
Our understanding of it is not well-developed.
January 14th, 2004 at 16:06
I highly recommend a book edited by Dr. Sacks called "The Best American Science Writing 2003". None of the articles were written by him, but it is a great read nonetheless.
January 18th, 2004 at 01:13
Consciousness is an awful problem for material reductionism. It’s an easy thing to see how something physical can cause a mental effect. Stub your toe and you feel pain. But how does a mental - therefore nonphysical - thing cause a physical effect? How does your desire for a drink cause you to order a beer? That’s not far off than my thinking about lifting a book and causing it to levitate. Most philosophers of mind are generally predeterminist and some, like Daniel Dennet, even deny that people truly have mental states. Bizarre, no?