by Xiang Xiang Liew

Created on: December 15, 2009

Imagine standing outside on a sunny day in the middle of a green, sprawling park, as a little boy bounces up to you and hands you a red flower.  You take it and thank him with a smile.  As you hold up the flower to admire its beauty, different parts of the sunlight are either absorbed or reflected by the petals, resulting in a 600 nanometers wavelength of light bouncing off the petals, passing through the front of your eye, and hitting your retinal cells, causing electrical signals to be transmitted through your optic nerve to various visual processing areas in your brain.  Somewhere along the way, as all those neurotransmitters swim about in the synapses, as all those ion channels open and close, as all those action potentials flash across their respective axons – somehow, almost as if by magic, all that neural activity results in you seeing the redness of the red flower before you.  This is the great mystery of consciousness: How do all those little bits of electricity, flashing around in our brains, give rise to the subjective, phenomenological experience of human perception, emotion, thoughts, conscious control of our actions, the irrevocable feeling that we, as free individuals, have a physical and mental existence in the context of a larger physical world?

No wonder philosophers back in the olden days felt compelled to invoke dualism, the idea that mind and body are two separate entities, and even made up of completely different substances – the famous “soul” theory.  The problem with this view, of course, is how would a non-physical “soul” influence and control a physical body?  Philosophers since Descartes have come up with increasingly convoluted metaphysical theories to deal with the so-called “‘explanatory gap’ between the physical and the phenomenal facts… the fact that when someone’s perceptual system is in a certain physical condition, that person has an experience with a certain phenomenal character” (Shoemaker, 2007).  Despite all the philosophical work that has been done on consciousness, and the advances of brain-imaging techniques such as fMRI and PET scans, consciousness is still a relatively poorly-understood topic in scientific terms.  In fact, the problem with consciousness is precisely the fact that the subjective quality of it seems unexplainable in scientific terms.  Ramachandran (1998) illustrates this problem with

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