Abstract
Consciousness has both natural and cultural histories. How over millennia a seemingly simple organ with similar set of brain molecules, neurotransmitters and synapses across insects, fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals led to the emergence of a superior capability called consciousness in humans is a question that has persisted for many centuries. This chapter gives a profile of brain’s neural structure and its functional organization in the background of debates that polarize brain-mind, body-mind and body-self binaries. The varied expressions of our minds and bodies necessarily involve complex brain activities. But do all life expressions, and the central mark of life, that is consciousness, owe their existence completely to neural mechanisms is a question that requires not just neurosciences, but philosophy and ethics, for discussion. This issue brings to us the central feature of consciousness, which is, its experiential primacy. But, is the experiential primacy understood by positing the ‘hard problem’ alone? In this chapter a ‘harder problem’ of consciousness is presented as responsible for the elusive explanatory gap. The ‘harder problem’ is the experiencer that gives a value of taste, smell, good, bad, happy, sad etc. to an experience.
To confine oneself to studying consciousness as such means to consider the phenomenal content of one’s mental representations—that is, how they feel to you from the first-person perspective, what it is like (subjectively, privately, inwardly) to have them.
—Thomas Metzinger, ‘The Ego Tunnel’, (2009), p. 10
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Notes
- 1.
Upanishads are ancient Indian philosophical texts from circa 4th century BC.
- 2.
Katha upanishad: 2.1.1–2.
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Menon, S. (2014). Beginnings: Biological and Philosophical Accounts of Consciousness. In: Brain, Self and Consciousness. Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality, vol 3. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1581-3_3
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