Imagine the amazing possibility of mastering your dreams with your consciousness. You could manipulate dreams into any wished situation wherein even impossible events like flying, time travelling or even travel through space could become possible. Everything that could not be reached in life could be experienced in such a dream; dreams become true in a dream. Now would that not be amazing?

(based on Peter Russell’s The Primacy of Consciousness)

One of the most feverishly pursued issues in modern psychology is the “hard question”: How does something as immaterial as the consciousness arise from something as unconscious as matter (Chalmers, 1995)? Many researchers have turned to the fields of quantum physics, information theory or neuropsychology to answer this impending question. However, what if the answer requires a substantial shift of scientific paradigm and the anthropocentric view of our world is fundamentally wrong?

Will humans always remain technology centred now that we have tasted its fruits? Innovation is not an arbitrary element of the human being, for centuries we have been able to do without, and sometimes things even changed for the worse. It is only since the gradual emergence of the experimental-method, and the great concepts this yielded during the renaissance in Central-Europe, that the idea of constant progress got embedded in the western mind (John Gray, 2008). It seems that we all have eaten from the forbidden apple tree and are now expelled from our former ‘paradise’ where things could at least remain the same for an entire year.

What do we know about ourselves and our consciousness? We can at least be sure of one thing – that is, we have a physical body in which our consciousness resides, and that we are here and now and nowhere else. But even this can be challenged by an out-of-body experience: an experience during which an individual feels to be outside of his own body, which can be accompanied by the feeling of seeing oneself from a distance. The out-of-body experience (OBE) can be a part of a near-death experience, and is found in some individuals with certain neurological conditions, and it can also be induced by the drug ketamine. But this out-of-body experience can also be induced in perfectly healthy humans; as Henrik Ehrsson (2007) has shown.   

They make it feel like science fiction! Researchers in the field of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence frequently predict advancements that we have all seen in Science Fiction movies:

Hugo de Garis proposed that artificial brains would eventually exceed human intelligence by far and be able to answer “big questions of cosmic significance” (de Garis, 1996, as cited in Moon, 2007). Wasn’t Deep Thought (Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, 1978) similar build to answer the big question “about life, the universe, and everything”? What if Dr. Raymond Kurzweil is correct, and by the year 2045 machines of superhuman intelligence grow tired of being under our control (2009, as cited in Markoff, 2009)? I hope The Matrix (1999) doesn’t put any dangerous ideas in their minds!

Starting as four-year old, when I taught myself how to read by meticulously typing the words from my picture books into our MS-Dos computer, I consider myself to have grown up quite computer literate. But now, following a course that explores the possibility of machines to resemble us, it seems more like computers are growing literate of humanity.

The working memory capacities of today’s supercomputers still lack behind that of a human brain by about a factor of several millions. Nevertheless, every achievement in neural cognitive sciences brings us closer to a world in which computers might one day think and feel just like us. Already two years ago, scientist from IBM ran an electronic brain which, measurements have confirmed, acts like that of a rat only slower, which corresponds to about 1% of our own brain’s capacity (Hanlon 2009). In 2009 the same group of scientists was even able to electronically recreate a machine that closely resembled the in-cortex activity of a cat (Burt 2009). Researcher Henry Markram goes so far as to claims that we will be able to build an electronic human brain within 10 years (Hanlon 2009). Such a machine would not be able to perceive and evaluate data much in the same way as a human brain would. But what would be the effects?

Consciousness. What is consciousness? How can we define it? Can we explain human consciousness in terms of brain’s activity? These are some of the questions that I would like to discuss here, which have also been posted by scientists in an article appeared in the NewScientist of January 2010.