my blog is online now at www.geocities.com/jeffrey.stueber
Here's a brief sample from one entry
The January 29, 2007 Time magazine's "mind and body" main article
discussed the nature of consciousness and brain plasticity, among other
topics. Steven Pinker was commentator on consciousness and, as you might
suspect, used a standard Darwinian explanation for it. Research on
consciousness is both exhilarating and disturbing, he says, and I agree.
There is an "easy" problem aspect of this issue and a "hard" one and the
hard aspect of this research is, as Pinker describes it, "why it feels
like
something to have a conscious process going on in one's head - why there
is
first-person, subjective experience." It's hard, he says, because no one
knows what the solution might look like and everyone seems to agree that
it
is a mystery. But Pinker obviously thinks he knows an explanation for
consciousness and takes up the task to give us one.
His solution is stated early in alluding to Francis Crick who coined
the
phrase "the astoni****ng hypothesis" to describe an amazing idea that all
our
thoughts and ideas are but merely "physiological activity in the tissues
of
the brain." Consciousness, he says, can be pushed around by the brain:
electrical stimulation of the brain causes people to have hallucinations
and
so do drugs. Via these happenings he asserts that consciousness has its
root in biological processes and has nothing to do with an immaterial
entity
that transcends physical processes. Here Pinker confuses consciousness
with
the physiological effects present in the brain and conflicts with brain
research like that of Wilder Penfield who, upon stimulating the cortex of
victims of epileptic seizures, found them reliving past lives but fully
aware of the state of their brain and the fact their memories were indeed
old rather than immediate. Also, when part of the brain in some of his
patients was blocked such that an attempt to obtain a word in our
vocabulary is blocked, the patient could at will call up other areas to
provide the correct response. Our consciousness perceives the state of our
brain that can be changed via drugs (for instance) but it also can change
the state of our brain via meditation and other techniques and it is in
this
area that Pinker's understanding of the research is sorely lacking.
...... and the article continues....
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