Missing links in the consciousness debate

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/29/missing-links-in-consciousness-debate

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Reading Oliver Burkeman (The I in mind, 21 January) I was surprised to discover that many scientists deny there’s such a thing as consciousness. They should read Mary Midgley’s Are You an Illusion?, I thought. I liked Philip Goff’s response (Letters, 29 January), but now I wonder, why do academics interested in consciousness seemingly ignore David Bohm, of whom Einstein spoke as his intellectual successor? Bohm was a 20th-century American physicist who lived and worked in England. The Dalai Lama considered Bohm to be one of his scientific gurus, writing that Bohm was interested in consciousness because of its implications with regard to the theories of quantum physics.

Looking up the Dalai Lama’s reminiscence about the physicist in The Essential David Bohm, I was reminded that the book, edited by Lee Nichol, has as frontispiece a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem: “It was a hard thing to undo this unknot./The rainbow shines, but only in the thought/of him that looks…”

Consciousness is a hard problem, from the inside and the out. Mary Midgley, like Philip Goff, mentions Bertrand Russell. He was a student and friend of mathematician AN Whitehead, who became a philosopher. According to Bohm’s biographer F David Peat, Bohm was interested in Whitehead’s “process philosophy” when working at Bristol University from 1957. Bohm’s world was holistic, says Peat, and he believed that holism extends into human psychology and society. Maybe, as Philip Goff suggests, scientists and philosophers took a wrong turn in the 20th century. Maybe, if they correct the turn, they’ll come across David Bohm.Jan DubéPeebles, Tweeddale

• The non-dualist adepts will say that its rapidly ever-changing content creates the illusion of consciousness as such. Philosopher J Krishnamurti said that “to be conscious of something, to be aware of, to recognise, to understand, that is the whole field in which the mind is in operation, and that is more or less what we mean by consciousness. It is the structure which has evolved over the millennia, it is there and without its content it ceases to exist”. I suspect this to be as accurate as a description can ever be – given that this sentence is already projected thinking as content of mind itself. It is not difficult to conclude that it is only to be known experientially.Dr Richard WalshNottingham