Oska
CONSCIOUSNESS is a slippery concept. It isn’t just the stuff in your head. It is the subjective experience of some of that stuff. When you stub your toe, your brain doesn’t merely process information and trigger a reaction: you have a feeling of pain. When you are happy, you experience joy. The ethereal nature of experience is the mystery at the heart of consciousness. How does the brain, a physical object, generate a non-physical essence?
This experience-ness explains why pinning down consciousness has been described as “the hard problem”. Subjective experience doesn’t exist in any physical dimension. You can’t push it and measure a reaction force, scratch it and measure its hardness or put it on a scale and measure its weight. Philosophers have described it as the “ghost in the machine”. Even scientific ideas about consciousness often have an aura of the metaphysical. Many scientists describe it as an illusion, while others see it as so fundamental that it doesn’t have an explanation. Always at the centre of the riddle lies its non-physicality.
But what if consciousness isn’t so mystical after all? Perhaps we have just been asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to grapple with the hard problem, my colleagues and I at Princeton University take a more down-to-earth approach. My background lies in the neuroscience of movement control, what you could call the robotics of the brain. Drawing on that, I suggest that consciousness can be understood best from an engineering perspective. Far from being some sort of magical property, it is a tool of extraordinary power. It is a tool that can be…
