From Guy Inchbald, Upton on Severn, Worcestershire, UK
Sam Edge offers us the perfect example of the problem of consciousness (Letters, 30 May). He is colour-blind, but I am not, so I can never comprehend his subjective experience of seeing a rainbow, nor he mine.
All the optical and neurological science in the world can never change that. The matter is wholly inaccessible to natural science. In failing to appreciate his own predicament, it is he, not the philosophers, who is missing the point.
It is, in fact, some 2500 years since significant progress was last made in this area by philosophers. During that interregnum, they helped shape mathematics and the natural sciences. Now those disciplines are, at last, catching up and demonstrating in their own ways what Siddhartha Gautama, Lao Tzu and Parmenides understood so long ago, that consciousness is just a complex stream of delusory information, the perceived self just a construct within the stream.
To a philosopher, the natural scientist and the mathematician are something of teenagers still, scornful of their parents’ wisdom yet unwilling to accept their own limitations – and a good deal less patient.
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