Revisiting the Brain/Consciousness Knot (original) (raw)

This is an excerpt from my new book: "The Mindful Brain: The astonishing Journey to the world where psychology, neuroscience and culture join together." The Mindful Brain is a meeting place between professional basic issues of psychology, positive psychology, psychotherapy, mind and brain, and human life, from the 21st-century perspective, together with a futuristic fictional story. In this excerpt from the book, Norman, the main protagonist of this book, finds himself in an exploratory staggering voyage trying to delve into the age-old enigma that occupied the best minds throughout history, about the apparently unintelligible relations between human consciousnesses, which is part of the self, and the human brain. It is a puzzle described by D. Searle (1997) as: "How does the brain get over the hump between electro-chemistry to feelings?" and by G. Edelman (2000) in his poetic words as: "How does matter become imagination?" Meeting the old wise enigmatic Kim inspired Norman to turn his self-search journey into an amazing, mind-blowing ordeal. He understood that when people ask that question, they refer to the high functions of consciousness such as value system, meanings, authenticity, selfactualization, etc. Scientists are not overwhelmed by the relations between the animal brain and its consciousness (agreeing that animals also have some form of consciousness). Murray Gell-Mann gave the first key in deciphering this enigma. "The Scientific Project," said Gell-Mann in "the Quark and the Jaguar" (1995), " is composed of one integrative system made of different dynamic subsystems , placed in hierarchical order, ranging from particle physics, through chemistry, biology, to psychology," (to which we can add sociology and ecology at the top). Each discipline contains the laws of the discipline "below" it; however, each "higher "discipline deals with additional information and develops new specific laws that construe its particular observations. The leaping Jaguar's behavior could be understood by the laws