Flawed man

Like just about everyone my age, over the years, I’ve lost parts of my body and in some cases whole organs. I no longer have tonsils, an appendix, or a large portion of my right knee, but my consciousness persists, unimpaired. The same would be true, of course, if I should lose a kidney, a lung, or a limb. But lesion, injury, or death of the brain would be something else. Without the brain, and indeed without certain parts of the brain any more than sight is identical to the eyes, but consciousness as surely6 dependent upon the brain in the sense that consciousness is one of the brain’s principal functions. The brain is where consciousness lives.

Given this, what are we to make an assertions that the explanation of consciousness must be found in something other than the laws of physics and chemistry? Raymond Tallis writes that if you regard the brain as “. . . the seat of consciousness, then you are going to have to grant this bit of matter properties that no other material object possesses.” Tallis and Nagel both write as though they expect that consciousness requires something very different from the properties we ordinarily ascribe to matter. May be so, but if they are serious about this argument, it is only fair to ask where physics and chemistry fail. Is there a spot in the brain or elsewhere in the body where something is happening that is contrary to the laws of physics? Are there places where electrons change their charges from negative to positive, where ions flow against rather than with the concentration gradient, where energy is no conserved or the laws of thermodynamics are violated?

~ Page 164 / 165 Excerpt: "The Human Instinct" ~ Author Kenneth Miller