Conscious conundrum (Image: Rick Raymond/Getty)
Read more: “Existence special: Cosmic mysteries, human questions“
THINK for a moment about a time before you were born. Where were you? Now think ahead to a time after your death. Where will you be? The brutal answer is: nowhere. Your life is a brief foray on Earth that started one day for no reason and will inevitably end.
But what a foray. Like the whole universe, your consciousness popped into existence out of nothingness and has evolved into a rich and complex entity full of wonder and mystery.
Contemplating this leads to a host of mind-boggling questions. What are the odds of my consciousness existing at all? How can such a thing emerge from nothingness? Is there any possibility of it surviving my death? And what is consciousness anyway?
Answering these questions is incredibly difficult. Philosopher Thomas Nagel once asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Your response might be to imagine flying around in the dark, seeing the world in the echoes of high-frequency sounds. But that isn’t the answer Nagel was looking for. He wanted to emphasise that there is no way of knowing what it is like for a bat to feel like a bat. That, in essence, is the conundrum of consciousness.
Neuroscientists and philosophers fall into two broad camps. One thinks that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and that once we fully understand the intricate workings of neuronal activity, consciousness will be laid bare. The other doubts it will be that simple. They agree that consciousness emerges from the brain, but argue that Nagel’s…
