Sunday, October 28, 2007

Chalmers went one step further claiming that consciousness cannot be explained by any known scientific theory

Kasturirangan, Rajesh. Consciousness across Cultures: A Response to Bina Gupta's CIT: Consciousness Philosophy East and West - Volume 57, Number 4, October 2007, pp. 567-575 University of Hawai'i Press
Rajesh Kasturirangan Fellow, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
In recent years, consciousness has reemerged from the nether world of scientific and philosophical investigation and is now seen by many researchers as the last great unsolved scientific problem. There are several reasons for this shift in the status of consciousness studies. For one, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind are occupying the scientific and philosophical center stages, respectively. Furthermore, there has been a spate of books on consciousness by eminent scientists and philosophers.
To my mind, the current wave of texts on consciousness started with three pioneering books: Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (Penrose 1989), Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis (Crick 1994), and David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind (Chalmers 1996), each representing a radically different perspective on consciousness. Crick’s book was the most conservative of the three (despite its title): he claimed that consciousness is entirely a biological phenomenon identical with (as yet unknown) brain processes. Roger Penrose argued that the phenomenon of consciousness is tied to the foundations of physics in general and quantum mechanics in particular. David Chalmers went one step further, claiming that consciousness cannot be explained by any known scientific theory and that consciousness is a fundamental...
1790_57-4_06 533..576 they of the Advaitic or Aurobindian persuasion, I think that these systems are un-likely to be useful to the modern scientist when taken as a whole. ... Project MUSE ® Search Journals About MUSE

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