Consciousness matters to us.
Arguably it matters more than anything.
Take away the magic of sensations,
the magic we create, and we'd be smaller creatures
living in the duller world.
Yet consciousness is still a scientific mystery.
Does it mean there are dimensions to the universe that science
doesn't understand?
Or could it all be an illusion?
We revel in sensations.
Colours, sounds, tastes can seem unspeakably wonderful,
but what's really going on?
Inside my head
my brain is tracking the stimuli that reach my body's surface.
This activity is my brain is a purely physical process
but my experience of it seems anything but
purely physical.
And that's the problem.
Let's take the case of pain.
Suppose I were to prick my thumb,
my brain would respond to signals with an
internalised hurt response - what scientists call
the neural correlate of pain.
From an objective point of view,
this paining is nothing more than the activity of nerve cells,
but from my inside subjective point of view
well, it seems to be nothing less than conscious pain.
How can this possibly work?
How can there be physical matter on one side of the equation,
and non-physical consciousness on the other?
The 'explanatory gap', as it has been called,
drives philosophers crazy. In fact there are a good many who would say that the
physical brain is just the wrong kind of thing to give rise to consciousness.
You might as well suggest, it's been said, that numbers emerge from biscuits
for ethics from rhubarb.
Now, I have to agree that when they put it like that,
the sceptics may be right. You can't get numbers from biscuits
and you really can't get pain from nerve cells.
But here's the thing: who said you can?
Who said you get pain from anything?
What if the pain I experience
doesn't really exist at all?
let's reconsider.
When I prick my thumb,
my brain does something physical in response.
It creates the neural correlate.
When I observe this neural activity from the inside
it appears to me, in the theatre of my mind,
that I'm in the presence of a pain sensation.
But that's just it. Appears to me as pain.
So what's really at issue is not the reality of pain but the appearance of it
and the question should be not how can my brain give birth to pain as such,
but how can it give birth to something so remarkable
so tricky, perhaps, that it looks to me like pain?
That's why I think
Richard Gregory's real impossible triangle
provides such a useful analogy.
Note we don't have to explain the existence of the impossible triangle.
We only have to explain
the existence or something that looks like
an impossible triangle.
Now with consciousness I admit we're not nearly there yet,
we don't know what the actual illusion-generating mechanism is.
I'm confident that neuroscientists,
armed with the right questions will soon be closing in.
Even so, there must be limits to what a neuroscientific explanation
can tell us about the origins of consciousness.
Though it may explain the 'how',
it can never explain the 'why'.
And of course an evolutionary psychologist like me
can't leave it there. Given that consciousness has evolved
by natural selection, we have to ask
what the evolutionary advantage is.
Richard Gregory invented this object precisely so as to amaze us.
Why ever should nature have designed us
to amaze ourselves?
Well, there's an unexpected answer, but it's the answer that
as a scientist I'd put my money on.
If we want to learn how these remarkable experiences
contribute to biological survival, we need to look at the lives of conscious creatures
in their natural environment, and for humans
that means especially the world of other people.
When we survey the social scene
I think the evidence is clear. The chief benefit of being conscious
lies in the way it changes people's psychological profile.
Consciousness feeds our self-worth,
our joy in life, our fear of death,
and especially it increases
our respect for the other conscious beings we live alongside.
By placing each one of us
at the centre of a mystery, consciousness encourages us
to think of ourselves and others as spiritual beings,
and of the world about us as an enchanted place.
The philosopher Descartes famously said,
"I think therefore I am", but the consciousness
that has evolved around the magic of sensations is deeper
and more generous than this. I feel therefore
I feel therefore I am.
Therefore you feel and you are too.
If you want to post your questions
in the comment section below, please do that,
and we'll come back and try and provide some answers
in a follow-up video in a few months time.