[…] the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable.
In my work at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, I collaborate with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards and mathematicians – and philosophers too – trying to do just this. And together with other laboratories, we are gaining exciting new insights into consciousness – insights that are making real differences in medicine, and that in turn raise new intellectual and ethical challenges. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive. In this story, we are conscious ‘beast-machines’, and I hope to show you why. […] (1)
This is how an article written by a scientists reads in the beginning!
Impossible. And yet true.
Modern dogmatism is just crude. The “material basis” is just something scientists now state at the BEGINNING of their papers/ articles, as if it is something self-evident. They use the very same thing they should be looking to analyze as BASIS for their conclusions!
This is how it always is minutes before collapse.
Arrogance brakes in…
Cornered in the dead-end of consciousness research, humans will someday have to face their worst and most fearsome enemy: Themselves…
And at the end, where Consciousness is waiting free from the bondage of the material body, the truth awaits smiling.
A faint smile…
Cannot be detected with an MRI…
