A recently posted reader response on The Daily Dish describes the controversial theories of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff:
Because quantum mechanics allows for non-local patterns, and because these non-local patterns repeat everywhere, the implication is that the universe is in some way conscious, and that we are part of that consciousness.
Whether Penrose and Hameroff are right about the mechanisms or not, they are struggling with the right question. Consciousness is the final mystery which we must struggle with.
The competing positions seem to be:
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Our bodies are just machines that are run by some kind of conscious "ghost", the way a remote control airplane is run by the person with the controls.
This is not likely. Current brain research shows that our brains are actually involved in the process of making decisions. Some decisions are even made before we become conscious of them, at the neural level. -
When a brain reached a certain kind of organization or complexity, consciousness "emerges".
This is better, though I find it hard to believe. Consciousness seems to me to be something completely different in kind from the normal, mechanical processes that we observe in the brain. -
Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like energy.
This seems to me to be the most obvious answer. I don't mean, of course that cooked carrots are sitting around thinking about Shakespeare. But is does seem likely to me that when we talk about consciousness we are simply talking about the way things look from the inside, so to speak.
For this reason, I like the above quote, even though I know nothing at all about Penrose or Hameroff.
