"When you digest your lunch is that you?"

This question is posed by Dr. Crick, who, at 87, is still attempting to determine what creates conscious awareness.
Is there a dividing line that separates mind (consciousness) from matter (the millions of neurons operating in the brain and the nervous system)? The NYT states: “While some philosophers claim that consciousness is a phenomenon outside the purview of material science, Dr. Crick dismisses such arguments with the imperious confidence that is part of his legend.”

If you are as fascinated by the debate over the validity of a neurobiological approach to understanding consciousness, you’ll have read, no doubt, today’s NYT Science article on this subject (here). If you’re not, well YOU SHOULD BE! Today, the weblog is seeking to educate and expand the horizons of the fellowship of blog readers. From Slovakia (below) to the brain: let it not be said that I write about fat cats (below) and Siberian irises (below) alone! [Have I suddenly strayed from my pledge to maintain an incredible lightness of blogging? Nothing could be further from the truth; the post titles alone should reassure the worried reader who does NOT wish to be educated, but simply wants to kill time in between more valuable pursuits, such as reading other, more worthy blogs.]

Dr. Crick is ruthlessly opposed to the idea of a consciousness that “lives” outside the body. In the Times article we read: “In a 1979 editorial in Scientific American, he argued that the time had come for science to take on the previously forbidden subject of consciousness. In his 1994 book "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul," he went further. "You," he wrote, "your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."”

Does Dr. Crick’s view diverge from mainstream science? The Times states: “While many scientists assume that consciousness is a global property of the brain — "a gestalt phenomenon" — Dr. Koch and Dr. Crick say they believe that only a few neurons are responsible at any given moment. Of the 50 billion or so neurons in the brain, Dr. Crick says that perhaps only tens of thousands, or even a few thousand, give rise to the feeling of conscious awareness. "We believe it is essentially a local phenomenon," he said. That position is certainly contentious. "The idea that there is a special population of neurons that mediate awareness is a minority view," Dr. Kanwisher noted.”

Moreover, Dr. Crick’s work raises questions about when exactly we can speak sensibly of consciousness: “[H]e asks, "How do we know that a newborn baby is conscious?" Perhaps consciousness is something that doesn't begin at birth, he said, but gradually emerges.” Dr. Crick insists that in the next several hundred years the idea of an independent soul will have been discarded with the science of the Dark Ages.

Be proud that you've read this far! This blog will stand out one day as being at the vanguard of modern science -- it will be admired for putting forth revolutionary ideas in the same way that bloggers 500 years ago, had they the time and means to do so, may have been tempted to link to the Copernicus website (we all know that he was Polish, right?), to share with other bloggers all that we now take for granted.