It is hard
not to notice the fact that an unusually high percentage of Nobel laureates, from Gerald Edelman to Francis Crick turn their attention to the problem of consciousness and formulate embarrassingly ridiculous theories of consciousness. Why is that?
Then there are people who are completely outside the field of neuroscience who propose ridiculous theories of consciousness. For example, Roger Penrose, a well-known mathematician who invented "twistor theory", has been very vocal about his theory that consciousness is really a Bose-Einstein condensate in microtubules. Seriously, this is the peak of absurdity, but it's hard to appreciate this unless you have a biological, and better yet, a neurobiological, background and understand what a Bose-Einstein condensate is.
I am anticipating that Stephan Wolfram, the creator of the Mathematica software, and also an ego-maniac extraordinaire, will soon be proposing that consciousness is nothing more than a cellular automata (CA).
Should we blame philosopher David Chalmers for bringing consciousness theories back in vogue? Now anyone with a consciousness theory, no matter how silly it is, feels compelled to push it as "the theory of consciousness". Is it any wonder that we are still left without a generally useful and detailed theory of consciousness? Yet hordes of individuals feel compelled to add to the noise because everyone else is making noise about theories of consciousness. And if they have a Nobel prize under their belt, then they're given a microphone. And yet we still are left without a generally useful and detailed theory of consciousness.
My belief: that our ignorance of brain organization precludes an understanding of consciousness. Instead of looking for a "new physics" to explain consciousness, or new metaphors, the insights that will lead to a real (i.e, useful and detailed) theory of consciousness will be found in the detailed scrutiny of brain and neuroanatomical organization.
