Neurotrash (Prospect Magazine)

An interesting article by a doctor who doesn't believe the brain is the seat of consciousness (which is correct).

There is no conceivable neural account of many aspects of human consciousness. A record of neural impulses cannot explain the simultaneous unity and multiplicity of the moment.

...

Nor can neural activity explain memory, as the material of the brain has no way of representing the tenses of time; indeed as Einstein emphasised, for physicists, the past, present and future are stubborn illusions.

Spot on. As I explain in "Key principle of life, for life, No. 2" there is no science that can get anywhere near explaining the at-once relationships of parts within wholes.

What's more my 2nd Proof of the impossibility of physical movment raises the question of how we reach into the near pre-physical possibilities that are associated with all matter and energy (that comprise our brains and bodies).

Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves. [Sir Lawrence Bragg]

Consciousness clearly reaches beyond local space and time. It simply has to, if the brain-bits are to help us 'collapse the wave-functions'. It is these very wave-functions associated with the stuff in our heads and bodies that envelop, and give the sense of choice.

As physicist Freeman Dyson explains

Quantum mechanics makes matter even in the smallest pieces into an active agent, and I think that is something very fundamental. Every particle in the universe is an active agent making choices between random processes.

Where else would that sense come from?

Doh.