A Different View
(Beyond Ourselves #04)
What's in the series? Previous: Computers made of meat? Next: Thinking ABOUT things
There are two completely different ways to describe us: there is what a scientist can see when she studies your brain, and there is your personal experience. What the scientist can know about you is not the same as what you know.
Your inner world includes things like thoughts, hopes, fears, memories and plans. No-one else can know what you are thinking about, or hoping, or fearing, just by looking at what your brain cells are doing.
Will we one day have enough scientific knowledge to bridge this gap? it seems unlikely, because they are two different kinds of description. No amount of knowledge about how your brain works will get us any closer to a scientific description of personal experience.
As the famous physicist Erwin Schroedinger said:
'The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I don’t think so.'
To respond to this video go to www.facebook.com/godnewevidence.
