There’s much fun to be had – as well as a lot of heavy duty philosophy, metaphysics and epistemology to wade through – wrestling with such easy-to-ask, fiendish-to-answer questions. And even if we get past them, or at least put them to one side, that still leaves us with what’s going on within ourselves to enable all these experiences and perceptions (and deceptions) to be integrated into something, someone, with a sense of themselves.
We are still a long way from developing a widely agreed neuroscience of consciousness, with many researchers shying away from an area so overshadowed by philosophy and riddled with subjectivity. There are all sorts of theories from it arising from high-frequency resonances between different regions of the brain, to it being a form of quantum computing taking place on an atomic scale in microtubules in neurons across the brain and possibly beyond.
Some of the current thinking on this would blow your mind – if only, as we’ve established, it weren’t so tricky nailing down what we mean by “mind”. And by “your”. What we can under the circumstances be reasonably sure is true is that for all our scientific understanding of ourselves and our brains, we remain very hazy on how our selves and our brains fit together.
It’s not something we tend to think about... except perhaps fleetingly on those mornings we wake up disoriented in a strange bed having had one drink too many. Or when a movie deliberately messes with our head.
I meditated upon it a great deal, as a matter of fact.
For many years.
I studied Philosophy.
All I could find.
Philosophy of the occident and the orient, both exoteric and esoteric.
All is philosophy.
The love of wisdom.
The desire to know.
The good right desire of the pure heart and soul and mind.
But remember, neuroscientists;
The materialist paradigm is not the ultimate wisdom.
Time!
Ha ha ha!
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