Theos-Talk Archives (September 2005 Message tt00222)

Dear Leon,
Science finally getting closer to your ABC
Cass
Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness

By Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
posted: 08 August 2005
06:05 am ET

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050808_human_consciousness.html





At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined
25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. Nestled
among queries about black holes and the nature of dark matter and dark
energy were questions that wandered beyond the traditional bounds of physics
to venture into areas typically associated with the life sciences.

One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness.

He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset
consciousness in infants and speculated that consciousness might be similar
to what physicists call a "phase transition," an abrupt and sudden
large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The
emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a
critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.

In a recent email interview, Gross said he figures there are probably
many different levels of consciousness, but he believes that language is a
crucial factor distinguishing the human variety from that of animals.

Gross isn't the only physicist with ideas about consciousness.

Beyond the mystics

Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes
that if a "theory of everything" is ever developed in physics to explain all
the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account
for consciousness.

Penrose also believes that quantum mechanics, the rules governing the
physical world at the subatomic level, might play an important role in
consciousness.

It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered
to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically.
But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in
biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for
extraterrestrial life in astronomy.