[Advaita-l] A Scientist's View of Consciousness

[S Jayanarayanan]

An excellent article in Scientific American that touches upon Physics
Nobelist Steven Weinberg's concession that present-day scientific
knowledge does not explain or account for the existence of
consciousness:

http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.html

Extract: "It is widely believed that physics provides a complete
catalogue of the universe's fundamental features and laws. As
physicist Steven Weinberg puts it in his 1992 book "Dreams of a Final
Theory", the goal of physics is a "theory of everything" from which
all there is to know about the universe can be derived. But Weinberg
concedes that there is a problem with consciousness. Despite the
power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness does not
seem to be derivable from physical laws. He defends physics by
arguing that it might eventually explain what he calls the objective
correlates of consciousness (that is, the neural correlates), but of
course to do this is not to explain consciousness itself. If the
existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a
theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final
theory must contain an additional fundamental component."

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