‘The only menace is inertia.’ — St. John Perse
The one thing neuroscience cannot find is the loom of cells that creates the self. If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don’t even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
This is all undoubtedly true. And yet, if the mechanical mind is denied the illusion of a self, if the machine lacks a ghost, then everything falls apart. Sensations fail to cohere. Reality disappears.
{ Jonah Lehrer/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }
Lehrer’s notion is that the mystery of “self,” now the great challenge for neuroscientists all over the world, was a puzzle first articulately addressed by artists untutored in science.
“We now know enough to know that we will never know everything,” Lehrer wrote. “This is why we need art; it teaches us how to live with mystery.”
August 9th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
My thought was the key to our very existence is the link between our consciousness and our sub conscience mind. A religious person would say the final full knowledge was kept from us (adam, eve the garden.) The other spectrum is that we do have the knowledge its just blocked, maybe for our own self preservation.