Apparent mysteries
In Part 1 the concept of consciousness was elucidated. It is a widely ramified concept with multiple centres of variation. But there is nothing mysterious or arcane about it. Nevertheless it is widely held by neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers that, as Francis Crick (a neuroscientist and Nobel laureate) wrote, consciousness ‘is the most mysterious aspect’ of the mind/brain problem. Eric Kandel (another Nobel laureate) asserted ‘perhaps the greatest unresolved problem…in all of biology, resides in the analysis of consciousness’. Psychologists concur: Stuart Sutherland remarked ‘consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved’. John Frisby held that consciousness ‘remains a great mystery, despite considerable advances in our knowledge of perceptual mechanisms’. Philosophers, who should know better, go along with this mystery-mongering: Daniel Dennett observed that consciousness ’is the most mysterious feature of our minds’ and David Chalmers stated that ‘conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.
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