|
so:text
|
Joe Rogan: What do you think consciousness is? Do you think consciousness is clearly a factor of brain tissue and energy, or do you think it's possible that what our brain is is something that "tunes into" consciousness?
Brian Greene: Well, I've spent some time thinking about this question, and I think it is perhaps the deepest question that faces science, or even humanity at some level. My own personal perspective is that consciousness is nothing more than the choreographed motion of particles in various quantum states inside a gloppy, gray structure that sits inside this thing that we call a "head". Do I have any proof for that? No. Does anybody have any proof of what consciousness is? Not at all at this moment. But the history of the reductionist program, where we have been able to take some of the more spectacular creations that have emerged in the world and recognize that they are nothing but the product of their ingredients and the laws of physics, leads me to extrapolate that idea to the experience of consciousness. Now, having said that, there's a deep puzzle. It's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is: if electrons and quarks and particles and laws of physics are all that there is, and if you buy into the fact that electrons don't have an inner world, that quarks don't have an inner world, how can it be that by taking a collection of those particles, you can turn on the lights? How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless particles somehow yield mindful experience? And that's a deep question that science has not yet answered. My own feeling is, when we understand the brain better, that question will evaporate. We'll look at the brain with our newfound understanding, maybe it's a hundred years in the making, maybe a thousand years in the making, and we'll say: "Aha! When electrons and quarks and protons move in this particular configuration, one of the byproducts is an inner sensation that we call conscious experience." And that, to me, is the likely answer that we will find. But there are some very smart, well respected people who go in a very different direction. There are some who say: electrons and protons and quarks, they do have a fundamental proto-conscious quality. They themselves are conscious beings of a sort. Now, it is not like you are going to have electrons that are crying, or quarks that are anguishing, but if you have a little proto-element of conscious experience that is imbued into a particle, and then you take a lot of the particles and then you put them together, the idea is, that yields the manifest conscious experience that we're familiar with. I don't buy into that.
Joe Rogan: Why do you pick a position?
Brian Greene: Well, I take a position on this because I guess my view is, you look out at the world, and what you do as a physicist is, you move the smallest degree required to explain the phenomena that you are observing. And to move from our current understanding of the world, to leapfrog to a place where electrons are conscious and quarks are conscious, to me is such a fantastically radical move that I don't consider it justified to make that move with our current level of understanding. There was a time, back in the 1800s, when life itself was so mystical that people basically said the same kind of thing: how could a collection of lifeless particles ever come together and yield a living being? They said that they can't. You have to induce a life force, you have to inject a life force, and that's what sparks the emergence of life from lifeless particles. I don't think any serious scientist thinks that today. I think most serious scientists say: "Yes, life is wonderful, life is in some sense miraculous, but life is nothing but the particles of nature coming together to yield the complex molecules of DNA and RNA, the complex cellular structures, the cells come together to yield the more complex multi-cellular organisms, and that is all that it takes to have something that is alive." No life force is necessary. That way of thinking about the world has gone away. And my own feeling is that that kind of progression is going to happen to consciousness. Today it's utterly mysterious how it is that I have this inner voice talking inside my head, how it is that I look around the world and I can see the color red, and I can experience the color red. I don't just have sensors that can call that "red". I mean, an iPhone can do that. I actually have an inner world where I feel that color red. Where does that come from? Hard to answer, that question, but I think, a hundred or a thousand years from now, we'll look back and smile at how we in this era invested consciousness with such a mystical quality, when in the end, it's nothing but particles and the laws of physics, and that's all there is to it. (en) |
