The Science of Consciousness

"While neural activity of a certain kind is a necessary condition for every manifestation of consciousness, from the lightest sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is neither a sufficient condition of it, nor, still less, is it identical with it." (Ray Tallis, writing for New Scientist)

In recent years, big players in the world of philosophy of mind have joined forces with neuroscientists and psychologists to try and work towards building a complete science of consciousness. This has so far resulted in a stream of unfinished theories that show the proponents, philosophers especially, dismsissing valid lines of enquiry beacuse they seem to be speculative or out of tune with pre-defined schools of thought.

The above quote seems to be representative of the core issue: subjective supposition is totally at odds with scientific methodology and objective measurement. That is to say, you may hypothesise that a person without a brain can not be conscious, therefore consciousness must reside in the brain. But objective measurement of the brain will only be able to expose the presence of neural activity which, although essential to consciousness, is not synonymous with it. Therefore consciousness is immeasurable and fundamentally unfit for scientific attention.

There is surely no reason to abandon all hope though. This is a very modern field of emergent enquiry and those involved must not be scared to a lay a few well held beliefs on the line now and then if they are to discover truly valuable lessons. After all it was only a few decades ago that seemingly chaotic systems in the natural world seemed to be utterly repellant to the classes of categorisation available within classical Newtonian physics. In the end, the establishment was forced to revolutionise its own deep-routed convictions to allow for the evidence that had become apparent.

But what methods are there to measure consciousness itself? Well, there's nothing much at the moment... EEG scans can measure brain waves, facial observation technology can decipher a range of emotions and first person psychoanalytic testing can shed a certain amount of light on how and why we behave as we do; but none of these provide a direct route. They only interpret symbolic or representative phenomena. We don't know how to qunatify consciousness so we have no way of measuring it. However, some have glimpsed the kind of innovations that might become available in the future.

Needless to say, philosophers and scientists are not going to start producing cohesive findings in such a complex and diverse field until they move towards shedding the restraints of their allegiances to ideological silos or 'isms'. What's needed is a little open-mindedness and the willingness to start from the ground up.