Consciousness; neuroscientist has no explanation (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 06, 2015, 18:24 (3339 days ago) @ David Turell

David Eagleman in an interview:-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exploring-the-mysteries-of-the-brain/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20151006-"Eagleman: Consider that whole beautiful world around you, with all its colors and sounds and smells and textures. Your brain is not directly experiencing any of that. Instead, your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever experiences are electrochemical signals coursing around through its massive jungle of neurons. Those signals are all it has to work with and nothing more. From these signals it extracts patterns, assigns meaning to them, and creates your subjective experience of the outside world. Your reality is running entirely in a dark theater. Our conscious experience of the outside world is one of the great mysteries of neuroscience: not only do we not have a theory to explain how private subjective experience emerges from a network of cells, we currently aren't even certain what such a theory would look like. In the series I confront that mystery, and others, to give an indication of where the field is going, and how this might get solved.-***-"Eagleman: Mike May was blinded in a chemical explosion at the age of three, and grew up entirely blind. In his 40s he underwent a surgery to repair his scarred corneas, thereby allowing light to pass through once again. The surgery itself was a success, but the amazing thing is that Mike still wasn't able to see, at least not the way we think of vision. Although his eyes were now functioning perfectly well, his brain couldn't interpret the signals. He stared at objects and people around them, but he couldn't make sense of the jangling, buzzing data. Mike's case reminds us that vision is not about the eyes but about the brain. Vision arises not simply from photons hitting the retina, but instead from the brain's proper interpretation of the signals that result."-Comment: As I've said before, our brain works for us and there is a back and forth with brain plasticity that shapes what we experience.