image credit: Ro Irving
Paul Broks contemplates the mystery of conciousness in a recent essay written in response to Nicholas Humphrey’s latest book: Seeing Red: A Study in Conciousness.
Phenomenal consciousness is about the temporal “depth” of the present moment. The subjective “now” is, paradoxically, extended in time: it is “temporally thick.” We experience it not as an infinitely thin sliver of time but as a moment in which times present, past and future overlap. We travel through life as in a “time ship,” which “has a prow and stern and room inside for us to move around.” The problem is that the notion of the “extended present” is fundamentally incoherent to the commonsense mind. Our experience (”the thick moment”—an amalgam of past, present and future) is at odds with our understanding of the linearity of time. We can’t get our heads around those ineffable qualities of consciousness because, as the philosopher Natika Newton points out, the very nature of the X factor makes it, “analytically, ostensively and comparatively indefinable.” According to Humphrey (…) it is precisely this that gives consciousness its mysterious, out-of-this-world qualities, and creates the irresistible intuition of mind-body duality. Nature has performed a stupendous conjuring trick: the illusion of the soul. It is an illusion that at once creates and valorises us as conscious entities. It is thereby an adaptive illusion. Consciousness matters, says Humphrey, “because its function is to matter. It has been designed to create in human beings a Self whose life is worth pursuing.” Even beyond death.
ARTICLE ['They mystery of conciousness' by Paul Broks]
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