Consciousness: The Holy Grail of Neuroscience

The following is a video response I posted on YouTube to a blog post by Steve Ramirez about consciousness and neuroscience.

He writes the following:

Matthew Segall, known popularly as “0ThouArtThat0″ on youtube, is as eloquent as any up and coming philosopher – an eloquence rivaled in magnitude only by his deep misunderstanding of how science works. His musings on consciousness and God are admirable and bold, and it is refreshing to see a philosopher who doesn’t shy away from scientific theory. But he is also an example par excellence of a thinker who just gets science wrong.

I’ll rehash some of his claims because they echo the thoughts of numerous philosophers and – I hate to say it – even some scientists (these scientists tend to be more like Penrose and less like, say, Koch or Crick).

“Without a human brain, human consciousness is not possible… But it does not follow that consciousness is located inside the skull…”

“All the empirical studies of the brain that have ever been done and that could ever be done reveal only a correlation between experience and neural tissue. No causal relationship can be shown empirically…”

“No matter how hard we try to look for our own subjectivity in the brain, we will find only objects other than ourselves. You can’t see consciousness. You can’t feel it… This is why it is a category mistake to think empirical science could account for it in terms of brain activity alone.”

Really? You do not know, then, how precise our tools are. And so, allow me to lend a machete to this intellectual thicket. For starters, read this. It’s a nice and thorough review of what scientists mean by “consciousness” and the various, often clever, methods being used to show the connection between neural tissue and thought. (I purposely left out the word “correlate,” because as the studies below will demonstrate, causality is a realistic claim using today’s techniques).

Discovery stops when we sit down on the armchair and bask in awe at the magnificently complicated process of consciousness, and this awe blinds us to the tractability of the problem at hand. (To be fair, scientists often are up in the Ivory Tower for too long and forget to come down and share the importance of whatever experiment is brewing.)