2021-08-22, 02:35 AM
The professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience discusses his work to develop a scientific explanation for how the brain conjures consciousness
Quote:I was interested in your section about memory in the book, in particular about Clive Wearing. Wearing is someone who, as a result of a devastating brain infection, lost all conscious memory and lives in a permanent present tense, as if perpetually waking from coma. Yet the studies show that he demonstrates an abiding love for his wife. How is that explained?
I’ve never met Clive or his wife, only read about the case. But it highlights the fact that some of those things we think are necessary for selfhood are obviously not. There are all sorts of different forms of memory. Explicit conscious recall, autobiographical memory, is just one of them. In neurological patients, you often see how the mind is built of processes that in normal life we never see...
...But there is an inbuilt narrative however we describe it – our internal life is all storytelling?
Dennett is a little equivocal about what he thinks perceptual or phenomenal experience is, if it exists or not – whether, once you’ve explained all the functions of the system and its dispositions to behave in particular ways, there’s anything left over still to explain. I’m on board with that, because I think we can get a very long way to explaining the functions and dispositions of things to behave in particular ways. But I’m agnostic about whether at the end of this programme of trying to account in physical terms for properties of experience, there will still be some residue of mystery left, something more to explain.
Have your thoughts on that ever taken any spiritual swerve – in terms of the why of there being something rather than nothing?
It’s more that I think there’s hubris in assuming that everything will submit to a mechanistic programme of explanation. I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird. I want to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird.