The Mind

There is an interesting article on the the brain in the 1/29/07 issue of Time. I haven't read it completely yet, but it has piqued my curiosity and have skimmed some of it. The article that I find particularly interesting is the one on consciousness with the title, "The mystery of Consciousness" by Harvard Psychologist, Steven Pinker.

There are actually two problems surrounding consciousness, what philosopher David Chalmers, has called the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. The Easy Problem having to do with the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts "is to distinguish conscious form unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved."

The Hard Problem according to Pinker

is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else...
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows hat a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place (pp. 60-61).

There is currently no solution at the present time, and may never be a scientifically satisfactory answer especially for the Hard Problem.

This article raises a lot of questions about the proper limits of science, scientism, and what passes for knowledge that I hope to address over time. The article is definitely worth reading.