FOR all the millions of words generated in the quest to explain consciousness, are we really any nearer understanding it? Will the field ever boast its own theory of everything, one good enough to explain how non-material experience can miraculously appear in material brains?
Philosophers, psychologists, researchers of all flavours, have been striving to produce something definitive. You can hardly blame them for trying, but the main consensus so far is that consciousness is probably the trickiest thing we know of to pin down. It has no obvious function – as the mere fact of the many competing theories attests,…
