Right now you have a movie playing inside
your head.
It's an amazing multi-track movie.
It has 3D vision and surround sound for what
you're seeing and hearing right now, but that's
just the start of it.
Your movie has smell and taste and touch.
It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger,
orgasms.
It has emotions, anger and happiness.
It has memories, like scenes from your childhood
playing before you.
And it has this constant voiceover narrative
in your stream of conscious thinking.
At the heart of this movie is you experiencing
all this directly.
This movie is your stream of consciousness,
the subject of experience of the mind and
the world.
Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts
of human existence.
Each of us is conscious.
We all have our own inner movie, you and you
and you.
There's nothing we know about more directly.
At least, I know about my consciousness directly.
I can't be certain that you guys are conscious.
Consciousness also is what makes life worth
living.
If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives
would have meaning or value.
But at the same time, it's the most mysterious
phenomenon in the universe.
Why are we conscious?
Why do we have these inner movies?
Why aren't we just robots who process all
this input, produce all that output, without
experiencing the inner movie at all?
Right now, nobody knows the answers to those
questions.
We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation,
we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry,
chemistry explains biology, biology explains
parts of psychology.
But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into
this picture.
On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious.
On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate
it into our scientific view of the world.
So I think consciousness right now is a kind
of anomaly, one that we need to integrate
into our view of the world, but we don't yet
see how.
Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves.
I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness
into science, some radical ideas may be needed.
