Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking. Login or Take a Tour!
user-inactivated · 4516 days ago · link · · parent · post: The Ghost in the Machine: Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness
Contemporary neuroscience follows Descartes in conceptualizing consciousness as something that occurs internally. The difference is that for Descartes, the soul was the ghost in the machine, while for neuroscientists, the ghost is the machine.
That seems to be the crux of the whole article right there. And the space in between the reductionistic determinism v FREE WILL is pretty big. It seems like that that space is a "feature not a bug" and the ambiguity that is defined between these two understandings of human consciousness, at least cognitively for us great apes, has allowed us to feel the importance of the "I" after the "Thou".