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from the dept. [article] 'Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive subject; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.' Years later, Stuart Sutherland's sardonic view in his 'Dictionary of Psychology' (1989) is still largely held by psychologists and philosophers. Consciousness seems to have qualities that language cannot describe and appears beyond the reach of science. But Nicholas Humphrey, of course, does not adhere to this conviction, and he has spent the past four decades trying to prove otherwise. His latest work began as a series of lectures at Harvard University: Seeing Red is a fascinating introduction to his iconoclastic thinking. Conventionally philosophers have believed that for there to be subjective experience, there has to be a subject. 'The inner world presupposes the person whose inner world it is,' as the philosopher Gottlob Frege put it. Humphrey turns this argument on its head. 'It is our experience of the inner world,' he claims, 'that confirms the existence of a person.' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/07/30/bohum23.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/07/30/bomain.html < | >
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Pinning down the nature of consciousness
