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inexplicable
flummoxed
“The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable.”
penchant
acquiesce
preclude
confabulates,
cogent
pious
What kind of creatures are we that our beliefs, desires, personalities, and perhaps the destinies of our souls can be split with a scalpel?
perennial
soupçon
serendipity.
repertoire
if a crowd forms at a train platform, then often a train soon arrives.16 But crowds don’t impel trains to roll in. Something else—a train schedule—creates the correlation between crowds and trains.
delineate
provenance
We have no scientific theories that explain how brain activity—or computer activity, or any other kind of physical activity—could cause, or be, or somehow give rise to, conscious experience.
We have scientific laws that predict black holes, the dynamics of quarks, and the evolution of the universe. Yet we have no clue how to formulate laws, principles, or mechanisms that predict our quotidian experiences of tasting herbs and hearing street noise.
Perhaps one day—funding permitting—we will: the double helix of neuroscience will be discovered,
Or perhaps we were short-changed by evolution, and lack the concepts needed to understand the relationship between brains and consciousness.
Cats can’t do calculus and monkeys can’t do quantum theory, so why assume that Homo sapiens c...
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Perhaps we don’t need more data. Perhaps what we need is a mutation that lets us und...
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perhaps we possess the necessary intelligence and are hindered by a false belief.
False beliefs, rather than innate limits, can stump our efforts to solve puzzles.
What false assumption bedevils our efforts to unravel the relation between brain and consciousness?
mottled
indubitable
We have been misled by our perceptions.
hitherto
germane
we can prove that if our perceptions were shaped by natural selection then they almost surely evolved to hide reality.
comported
We naturally think that a tomato is still there—including its taste, odor, and color—even when we don’t look. Galileo disagreed. He held that the tomato is there, but not its taste, odor, and color—these are properties of perception, not of reality as it is apart from perception.
the probability is zero that we see reality as it is.
We see none of reality as it is.
If space and time exist only in our perceptions, then how can anything within space and time, such as neurons and their activity, create our consciousness?
Understanding the evolution of perception is a critical step toward understanding who we are, and the provenance of our consciousness.
“Beauty,” he said, “is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
objects, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder and inform us about fitness—not about objective reality.
Our bigger brains guarantee no inerrant attraction to bona fide human beauties.
panoply
fo...
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Each time you encounter a person, your senses automatically inspect dozens, perhaps hundreds, of telltale clues—
Which gives the lie to the idea that beauty is a whim of the beholder. To the contrary, it is the consequence of unconscious inferences within the beholder, inferences that were crafted over millennia by the logic of natural selection:
depredations
phenotypic
recursive
Infants as young as two months of age look longer at faces that adults rate more attractive.3
The trouble with computing beauty, with ferreting out the fitness of genes, is that genes themselves are invisible.
