The twentieth century has seen a scientific revolution. General relativity claims that fields are a crucial, deterministic part of reality. Quantum mechanics and string theory have introduced a difficult-to-predict and non-intuitive physical world. Biological Sciences also opened many secrets; Watson and Crick unveiled the structure of DNA in 1953. We learned intricate details of the cell's enzymatic pathways, and a recent achievement is human genome sequencing. Discovering the nature of consciousness should be a sweeping transformation that affects how we view ourselves and live our lives.
It is not that we do not think about the mental world. On the contrary, people have been interested in their minds for thousands of years, making consciousness perhaps the most discussed philosophical subject. The ancient philosophical questions of whether the mind's nature is physical, spiritual, or dual have progressed surprisingly little since then. However, the progress in understanding brain operation during the twentieth century prepared the ground for science to investigate consciousness's true nature.
What do we know about the brain? Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Korbinian Brodman were the early pioneers of brain anatomy. Cajal's neural drawings still illustrate anatomy textbooks, and cortical areas are named after Brodman. The brain's electric activity was first studied by Hans Berger in 1924. Over the past two decades, careful and ingenious studies have shown the crucial, interrelated relationship between frequencies and brain function. The shocking realization is not that a person's attitudes cause the brain's neural activity but that the concerted firings of neurons give rise to emotions, attitudes, and, finally, specific behavior.
String theory daringly states that energy vibrations are matter. However, the material brain gives rise to spontaneous energy vibrations. These oscillations form a self-regulating system. When the brain's energy neutrality is upended, emotions generate, dictating actions that recover an energy-neutral state. Indeed, unity is an essential feature of the mind. The body's representation in the brain allows a feeling of oneness with the body. Ideas and thoughts form a highly fluid, malleable mental background over which interaction with the outside world becomes possible.
The mind is a sensory kaleidoscope of transient ideas and possibilities that distill a single decision or understanding. The sensory "forest" coalescences a unified experience: all other options cease to exist once we decide on a problem. As early as 1957, the powerful inner drive to maintain cognitive consonance was recognized by Leon Festinger. His cognitive dissonance theory states that incongruent belief or behavior forces a mental change to avoid the frustration of cognitive or emotional discrepancy. People are willing to sacrifice their core convictions for mental congruence. The constancy of self becomes particularly apparent when changes, even dramatic ones, affect the body or the brain.
The memories and accumulated experience of the cortex constantly changes. Of the billions of photons hitting the retina and the millions projected to the optic nerve, only a few thousand bits of information, or even fewer, produce conscious perception. Therefore, consciousness is a highly subjective (holographic) mental landscape, unknowable, with the power to surprise even the self. The holographic self is experienced differently by the viewer and the self. Although separate, consciousness is an interconnected part of the material world. The physical basis for evolution and consciousness science is the subject of The Science of Consciousness, my 2015 book.
Image credit: "Blausen gallery 2014" and By OpenStax College
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