consciousness

I mentioned the other day that I was reading The Spiritual Brain. I came across a passage by Sir John Eccles, a Nobel laureate that worked alongside Hodgkins and Huxley to elucidate the nature of ion channels governing inhibitory post-synaptic potentials in a simple reflex pathway. While this work would be considered rudimentary in present day, this was the explosion of neuroscience in the '50s & '60s. Eccles pioneered research into the functions of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which was known about since the 1920s but was only examined further by his groundbreaking work.

I am by no means interested at the low-level study of ion channels (in fact receptor physiology has been my lowest grade in a neuroscience-related course), but I do have respect for all levels neuroscientific research. Despite studying only a bud in a lush neurophysiological rainforest, Eccles still had the same burning question that I have, and I don't even need an Oxford philosophy doctorate to ask it. The question, in all its simplicity: "What am I?"

From the perspective of metatheory, we look upon ourselves and ask the question: "Did God create the brain, or does the brain create God?" Is there a neural correlate for religion? Is there an anatomical basis for consciousness? It seems so scientific to think that synaptic firing = everything, doesn't it? But is there any other explanation?

Sir John Eccles: "I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neural activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition...We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world."

What do I think? I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone does. Ask me five years ago what I think about this idea, and I'd say, "Who gives a shit?" Ask me a year ago and I would say without hesitation that, by Occam's Razor and K.I.S.S. and all things elegant, there is no better explanation that we are just the product of neurons firing. Today, I am entirely uncertain, but I do think that one day we will find it like this:

A = God. B = brain. A∩B is where we will find consciousness.