Jun 202015
 

Each of us tends to subscribe to a worldview of one kind or another. The view I have adopted here and in my life is the most prevalent view among neuroscientists today: that all human experience derives from electrical and biochemical activity of the nervous system. The sensations of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, awareness and consciousness; the experiences of heat or cold, pleasure or pain, fear or comfort, anger or serenity; activities of moving, talking, playing and making love–everything that makes us human results from complex processes among vast numbers of neurons in the brain, the spinal column and the peripheral nervous system.

To me, the discoveries of the material mechanisms behind experience, our place in the panoply of living things and the evolutionary process by which we got here are sufficiently awesome to make it unnecessary to postulate forces or influences beyond the standard forces described by physics.

 Posted by at 8:54 pm on June 20, 2015

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