{"id":113360,"date":"2020-09-23T22:55:37","date_gmt":"2020-09-24T05:55:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/consciousness-existing-beyond-matter-or-in-the-central-nervous-system-as-an-afterthought-of-nature"},"modified":"2020-09-23T22:55:37","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T05:55:37","slug":"consciousness-existing-beyond-matter-or-in-the-central-nervous-system-as-an-afterthought-of-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/09\/consciousness-existing-beyond-matter-or-in-the-central-nervous-system-as-an-afterthought-of-nature","title":{"rendered":"\u201cConsciousness\u201d \u2013Existing Beyond Matter, Or in the Central Nervous System as an Afterthought of Nature?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/consciousness-existing-beyond-matter-or-in-the-central-nervous-system-as-an-afterthought-of-nature.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Does human consciousness exist separate from matter, or is it embodied in the body \u2013a critical player in anything that has to do with mind? \u201cWe are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.\u201d answers neuroscientist <a href=\"https:\/\/dornsife.usc.edu\/cf\/faculty-and-staff\/faculty.cfm?pid=1008328\">Antonio Damasio<\/a>, who pioneered the field of embodied consciousness \u2013the bodily origins of our sense of self. \u201cWe may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence,\u201d he says. \u201cwe have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Consciousness is considered by leading scientists as the central unsolved mystery of the 21st Century: \u201cI have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness,\u201d says <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sns.ias.edu\/witten\">Edward Witten,<\/a> theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey who has been compared to Isaac Newton and Einstein about the phenomena that has been described as assuming the role spacetime did before Einstein invented his theory of relativity.<\/p>\n<p>Some scientists have asked how can we be sure that the source of consciousness lies within our bodies at all? One popular, if mystical, idea, writes astrophysicist <a href=\"https:\/\/physics.asu.edu\/content\/paul-davies\">Paul Davies<\/a> in <em>The Demon in the Machine<\/em>, \u201cis that flashes of mathematical inspiration can occur by the mathematician\u2019s mind somehow \u2018breaking through\u2019 into a Platonic realm of mathematical forms and relationships that not only lies beyond the brain but beyond space and time altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Does human consciousness exist separate from matter, or is it embodied in the body \u2013a critical player in anything that has to do with mind? \u201cWe are not thinking machines that feel; rather, we are feeling machines that think.\u201d answers neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who pioneered the field of embodied consciousness \u2013the bodily origins of our [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,2229,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-mathematics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}