INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYMPOSIUM
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As Searle has argued, the aspects that make consciousness different
from all other biological phenomena do not exclude it from their realm.
Since consciousness is obviously the product of processes that occur in
our brain, understanding it is obviously a biological problem, albeit an
especially difficult, fascinating, and troublesome one. For that very rea–
son, the study of consciousness has recently become very
a
fa mode
among the romantics in science, the Faustian types who constantly mea–
sure themselves against the infinite. They include Francis Crick, surely
one of the greatest theoreticians of biology since Darwin, who has been
working on the consciousness problem for the last ten or so years.
Crick proposed that the search for the neural correlate of conscious–
ness, or NCC, ought to be the main agenda for people in quest of under–
standing consciousness. Unfortunately, Crick's specific conjecture
regarding the nature of the NCC, namely that it is represented by a syn–
chronous impulse rhythm at a frequency of
40
Hz of some neurons in
the thalamus and the cerebral cortex, has not worked out so far.
Ray Kurzweil remarked in his presentation that if the project of
securing a total understanding of the brain did succeed, this would rad–
ically change the human condition. I agree with his prognosis, but prob–
ably not for the same reason that I suppose led him to make it, namely
that we would have an enormously better comprehension of what
makes people act as they do. Securing that total understanding of the
brain would entail the end of humanity as we know it. Since our pivotal
transcendental belief about persons is the essential opacity of their
minds, the world of mankind would turn into a dramatically different
place once the human mind had been rendered transparent by the kind
of neuroscientific analysis of the brain Ray Kurzweil has in mind .
I don't believe, though, that there is any cause for worry, because I
deem it highly unlikely that the project outlined by Ray can actually suc–
ceed. Admittedly, in view of the likely future technical improvements in
making measurements on the living brain that he envisions, there seems
to be no limit to the data that we can eventually obtain. But there will
be no way of making much heuristically productive use of these massive
data unless a credible theory had been developed that would allow their
interpretation . The reason why no such theory is on the horizon is not
that we still lack sufficient data about the brain, but that the system is
too complex for being captured analytically in its totality.
What is the meaning of "consciousness"? The first difficulty that a
student of consciousness encounters is the explication of its meaning in
sufficiently concrete terms for investigating it scientifically. To explicate
some difficult term, it is often helpful to consider its antonyms to make
