> There is a profound difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness: consciousness is unobservable. You can’t look inside an electron to see whether or not it is conscious. But nor can you look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment but by being conscious.
But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time?
Perhaps this lines up another distinction between the thinking mind and actual consciousness.....but I'm not really convinced by the argument that consciousness is an unobservable black box.
> But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time?
But what does that have to do with consciousness (the experience of being)? All it shows is that our brains work the same way machines do, which isn't really a surprise. We can use a logic probe on machines and figure out how they work too. There is no way to determine if something experiences the world around it or "merely" is a product of a complex mechanism of reactions and interactions. That's what is meant by consciousness being unobservable.
But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time?
Perhaps this lines up another distinction between the thinking mind and actual consciousness.....but I'm not really convinced by the argument that consciousness is an unobservable black box.