The fourth state of matter: Consciousness, Max Tegmark. WHY are you conscious right now? Specifically, why are you having a subjective experience of reading these words, seeing colours and hearing sounds, while the inanimate objects around you presumably arent having any subjective experience at all? Different people mean different things by consciousness, including awareness of environment or self. I am asking the more basic question of why you experience anything at all, which is the essence of what philosopher David Chalmers has coined the hard problem of consciousness. A traditional answer to this problem is dualism – that living entities differ from inanimate ones because they contain some non-physical element such as an anima or soul. Support for dualism among scientists has gradually dwindled. To understand why, consider that your body is made up of about 1029 quarks and electrons, which as far as we can tell move according to simple physical laws.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 03:13:01 +0000
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