The consciousness wars: can scientists ever agree on how the mind works?

Unless such recourse to science, as the sole arbiter of collective truth, is thoroughly misplaced when we come to matters of mind or consciousness. For consciousness is a quintessentially quicksilver phenomenon, impossible to isolate and pin down.

At first, an Earth-wide census was collected where almost everybody, no matter how wild or speculative, had their opinions heard. Some, the linguists, noticed that the problem was very similar to what the psychologist William James once posed for language. How, in a written sentence, asked James, does one know where the words end and the sentence b

two possibilities. One calls for actual neural projections from the “affect complex” to the “posterior sensory set” and vice versa. The other possibility calls for approximate simultaneity of activations in the two sets, resulting in the production of a time-based ensemble. In either option, the ultimate realization of a conscious mind depends on b