It's all in the mind - but where's that?

An outstandingly thought provoking article in this week's New Scientist by Prof. Ray Tallis, tackling the question that science has yet to answer - where is the seat of consciousness?

Are our thoughts, our awareness of self, our emotional response to a beautiful piece of music, or to an awe-inspiring landscape - are these just reactions of matter and energy within our skulls?

(A neutral monist would say - yes, they reside in your brain and nowhere else outside of it.)

Prof. Tallis offers scientific comfort to those of us with a spiritual view on life who feel that there's more to our consciousness than mere neural activity. He tackles problems such as feelings of past and present, how memory has yet to be adequately explained and how neurophilosophers are uneasy with concepts such as the self, initiation of action and free will.

Science begins when we escape our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement [... ] You think the table over there is large, I may think it is small. We measure it and find that it is 0.66 metres square. We now characterise the table in a way that is less beholden to personal experience.

Indeed. Whether it's large or small, how can you ascribe your emotional associations (with tables you've seen in the past, aesthetic reactions to the table) to a mere chemical-electrical interplay of electrons, neurons and synapses?

(As I write about that table, the first association I have is with the table in the kitchen at Osterley House, West London, that I visited with my father and my son in 2007. This is the first time I've thought about that kitchen, that table, since. Yet the thought of that table in Osterley took me back to a similar kitchen and a similar table somewhere in Edwardian England. Why? )

Human consciousness is indeed the final frontier. We are no closer to understanding it than the mediaeval alchemists were to unravelling the secrets of the atom.

Many of us have experienced feelings that we know are not reduceable to matter and energy. We are biological entities, driven by an evolutionary imperative to survive and thrive. But there is more to us than that. Which is something I shall in my own humble way attempt to look for and describe. A guide to the lower foothills of inquiry into the place where neuroscience meets human spirituality.