In his book "The Astonishing Hypothesis" the late
Francis Crick argues that a person's mental activities
are entirely due to the behavior of neurons. The
"astonishing hypothesis" is '...that "You", your
joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,
your sense of personal identity and free will, are
in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly
of nerve cells and their associated molecules.'
This hypothesis itself is a higher form of self-awareness.
Could it be that consciousness of the self is astonishing,
because it is based on an astronomical number of cells
which interact for a short time? We know that the brain
has 100 billion connected cells. And we know that the
'mind' does not emerge from an isolated brain alone.
Consciousness emerges because the brain is adaptive,
it is able to relate events in the outside world to
some internal processes (*).
An interesting thing happens during "That's me" moments
of self-awareness. A single object in the outside world
- often linked to the spoken or written name - is recognized
as the self. A basic contradiction follows: on the one
hand the object is only represented by a few neurons.
On the other hand the self means everything, every single
of the 100 billion neurons. If n neurons span a phase
space of dimension n, could it be that self-awareness
is associated with a short-lived strange attractor of
very high fractal dimension, let us say 1 billion?
Just an idea. What do think?
-J.
(*)
From Brains to Consciousness
Steven Rose (Ed.)
Princeton Univ. Press, 1998
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