Towards a New Science of the Mind: Tucson

W hen you fall into deep sleep, what happens to your consciousness, to "you"? Does it hibernate or dissipate or what? Does it still exist? Your body continues to exist, your brain continues to control your body's rhythms otherwise you would never wake up but do "you" exist in oblivion? The celebrated physicist Richard Feynman became interested in this question while he was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1930s. He asked himself, do my thoughts sud.,. denly stop as I fall asleep, or do they move less and less rapidly, or what? Feynman decided to study himself falling asleep. He observed that "the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until you ask yourself 'What made me think of that?' and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what the hell did make you think of that!" Mter four weeks of self-experiment, Feynman concluded that, while it was possible to watch himself falling asleep, "I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not watching myself'. He composed a short verse on the problem of introspection: I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! How can "I" observe "I"? What are we really seeing when we stare into the depths of our own eyes in a mirror? Another great physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum theory, pondered on the problem in the tantalising epilogue of his classic What is Life? "Consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. Even in the pathological cases of split consciousness or double personality the two persons alternate, they are never manifest simultaneously. In a dream we Science's itself more or less clearly in inorganic nature, cease to function in front of the activities in our brain? "Leaving aside the inconsistency of such a view, the influence of alcohol and other sharply controllable factors on our thoughts, feelings and activities · should show very distinctly that determinism does not stop before the majesty of our human will. inner frontier "Maybe, we and human society require the illusion of freedom in our human activities! ... I believe that whatever we do or live for has its causality; it is good, however, that we cannot look through it." BY ANDREW ROBINSON