δεν θα είχε νόημα η ανθρώπινη εμπειρία εάν δεν μπορούσε το υποκείμενο της νόησης του

κόσμου, το υποκείμενο της εμπειρίας, να διατηρήσει μία σταθερή ταυτότητα. Δεν μπορώ να έχω
εμπειρία χωρίς το απείρως απλό αλλά ασάλευτο φαινόμενο του πρώτου προσώπου, χωρίς το
«εγώ». Δεν υπάρχει, τελικά, ανθρώπινη εμπειρία χωρίς μία συνεχή και άχρονη αίσθηση ενός
μοναδικού εαυτού.

Naturalism.org: Consciousness
Consciousness - phenomenal experience such as sensations, emotions, and other qualitative subjective states
- poses an intriguing and as yet unsolved problem for naturalists seeking a unified picture of the world. We
know conscious experience arises in conjunction with certain neural goings on in our brains, but there is no
consensus in the philo-scientific, naturalist community about why it should arise, or how. Naturalists often
gravitate to physicalism in proposed explanations - that consciousness must be essentially physical - but
naturalism is not necessarily equivalent to physicalism. Not all phenomena need be spatio-temporal to
qualify as naturalistically real, and experience is possibly one example.
 “The mental state of consciousness is just an ordinary biological, that is, physical feature of the brain.” Biological
naturalism John Searle “biological naturalism… supposes material and objective properties of human cognition
as essential to an understanding and analysis of that cognition and, by extension, cognitive play.”

How is it possible for conscious states to depend upon brain states? How can technicolour phenomenology
arise from soggy grey matter? What makes the bodily organ we call the brain so radically different from
other bodily organs, say the kidneys – the body parts without a trace of consciousness? How could the
aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons generate subjective awareness? We know that
brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever
of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic. Somehow, we feel, the water of
the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this
conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of materials with which to bring
consciousness into the world, but it appears that in some way they perform this mysterious feat. The mind-
body problem is the problem of understanding how the miracle is wrought, thus removing the sense of deep
mystery. We want to take the magic out of the link between consciousness and the brain.
Anthony flew: In considering our immediate experience, let us perform a thought experiment. Think for a
minute of a marble table in front of you. Do you think that, given a trillion years of infinite time, this table
could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of its surroundings, aware of its identity the way you
are? It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen. And the same goes for any kind of matter.
Once you understand the nature of matter, of mass-energy, you realize that, by its very nature, it could
never become "aware," never "think," never say "I." But the atheist position is that, at some point in the
history of the universe, the impossible and the inconceivable took place. Undifferentiated matter (here we
include energy), at some point, became "alive," then conscious, then conceptually proficient, then an "I."
But returning to our table, we see why this is simply laughable. The table has none of the properties of
being conscious and, given infinite time, it cannot "acquire" such properties.
theist philosopher Colin McGinn writes: 

“We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no
understanding of how this can be so. It strikes us as miraculous, eerie, even faintly comic.” (In Ib.)

Atheist Geoffrey Madell writes:

“The emergence of consciousness, then is a mystery, and one to which materialism signally fails to provide
an answer.” (Ib.)

And atheist David Papineau writes:

As to why consciousness emerges in certain cases, “to this question physicalists' theories of
consciousness’ seem to provide no answer.” (Ib.) 
Atheist Crispin Wright writes:

"A central dilemma in contemporary metaphysics is to find a place for certain anthropocentric subject-
matters—for instance, semantic, moral, and psychological—in a world as conceived by modern naturalism:
a stance which inflates the concepts and categories deployed by (finished) physical science into a
metaphysics of the kind of thing the real world essentially and exhaustively is. 
On one horn, if we embrace this naturalism, it seems we are committed either to reductionism: that is, to a
construal of the reference of, for example, semantic, moral and psychological vocabulary as somehow
being within the physical domain—or to disputing that the discourses in question involve reference to what
is real at all. 
On the other horn, if we reject this naturalism, then we accept that there is more to the world than can be
embraced within a physicalist ontology—and so take on a commitment, it can seem, to a kind of eerie
supernaturalism." (In Moreland, J. P.. Scientism and Secularism . Crossway. Kindle Edition.) 

This irresolvable problem within the noetic framework of atheism presents no problem for theism, which
affirms a supremely self-aware being. Moreland writes:

"If consciousness were to arise in this naturalistic creation account, it would be a case of getting something
from nothing. But if you start with God (the Logos), your fundamental being is conscious and there is no
difficulty in seeing how God could bestow consciousness on various creatures at his choosing. And this is
what Crispin Wright correctly understands." (Ib.) 

τη φιλοσοφία του νου, «qualia» ονομάζονται οι άρρητες υποκειμενικές ποιότητες της εμπειρίας, όπως η
ερυθρότητα ενός κόκκινου αντικειμένου, η αλμυρότητα του αλατιού, το άκουσμα του φλάουτου, ακόμα και
ο πόνος ή η χαρά.
Το σημαντικό, εδώ, είναι ότι το κόκκινο φως, δηλαδή το ηλεκτρομαγνητικό κύμα συχνότητας που
αντιστοιχεί στο κόκκινο, είναι απλώς αυτό: ένα ηλεκτρομαγνητικό κύμα συγκεκριμένης συχνότητας. Ως
υλικό αντικείμενο ή φυσικό γεγονός δε φέρει τίποτα από την ποιότητα του κόκκινου per se. Συνδέεται με
αυτήν, αλλά το κόκκινο αυτό καθαυτό, όπως είναι αντιληπτό από το πρώτο πρόσωπο, είναι οντολογικά
διαφορετικό από μία περιγραφή από το τρίτο πρόσωπο του γεγονότος του φωτός συγκεκριμένου μήκους
κύματος.
Μπορούμε να αναλύσουμε ολόκληρη την υλική διαδικασία της όρασης του κόκκινου αντικειμένου (Εικόνα
1). Μπορούμε να πούμε ότι το φως εισέρχεται στην κόρη, περνάει την ίριδα, διαθλάται από το φακό,
συγκεντρώνεται και ερεθίζει το οπτικό νεύρο, ηλεκτρικά σήματα καταφθάνουν στο κέντρο όρασης του
εγκεφάλου κτλ. Μπορούμε να περιγράψουμε τη διαδικασία μόριο-μόριο, φωτόνιο-φωτόνιο, όμως, όπως και
στο γνωστό νοητικό πείραμα της νευροεπιστήμονα που πάσχει από αχρωματοψία, δεν θα βρούμε ποτέ πώς
είναι να βλέπει κανείς το χρώμα κόκκινο.

Εικόνα 1.Αναπαράσταση του φωτός να εισέρχεται στο μάτι

Το ίδιο μπορούμε να πούμε, αναλόγως, για όλες τις υποκειμενικές εμπειρίες. Όπως το χρώμα δεν είναι η
συχνότητα του φωτός, έτσι και σχήμα δεν είναι παρατεταγμένα μόρια μελάνης σε χαρτί, μουσική δεν είναι
παλλόμενος αέρας, οσμή δεν είναι οι χημικές ενώσεις που ίπτανται στον αέρα, πόνος δεν είναι ηλεκτρικά
σήματα, και τελικά συνείδηση δεν είναι η «εξυπνάδα» ή υπολογιστική ικανότητα.
Ακόμα κι αν τα υλικά αυτά γεγονότα είναι άρρηκτα συνδεδεμένα με τις αντίστοιχες εμπειρίες, δεν
ταυτίζονται οντολογικά. Καμία υλική διάταξη αλλά και κανένα νευροφυσιολογικό γεγονός, ως φυσική
πραγματικότητα, δεν περιέχει εννοιολογικό περιεχόμενο, ή αυτό που ονομάζουμε νόημα. Και δεν τίθεται
ζήτημα εξέλιξης της επιστήμης ώστε να ανακαλυφθεί η σχέση υλικού και νοητικού, γιατί ακόμα και η πιο
θεμελιώδης φαινομενολογία της συνείδησης δείχνει ότι το πρόβλημα είναι μεθοδολογικό. Είναι τόσο
αγεφύρωτο το ποιοτικό χάσμα μεταξύ των αντικειμενικών γεγονότων της νευροφυσιολογίας και του
υποκειμενικού γεγονότος των qualia, που φαίνεται ότι η ανάπτυξη μίας θεωρίας για τη σχέση αιτιότητας
μεταξύ των δύο είναι επιστημολογικά αδύνατη.

The most urgent issue we humans face is how we conceive ourselves — whether as
complex lumps of matter guided by the so-called blind, meaningless laws of nature, or as
creatures who, although physical, are also imbued with something more: consciousness,
mind, will, choice, purpose, direction, meaning and spirituality, that difficult-to-define quality
that says we are connected with something that transcends our individual self and ego.
Every decision we make is influenced by how we answer this great question: Who are we?
The Face of Physicalism
Physicalism is the doctrine that the real world consists simply of the physical world. Its close
cousin is materialism, the creed that nothing exists except matter and its movements and
modifications, as well as the doctrine that consciousness and will are wholly due to material
agency.[6]These terms are often used interchangeably.

What does physicalism actually look like? It is a multifaceted view in which, as astrophysicist
David Lindley has said, “We humans are just crumbs of organic matter clinging to the surface of
one tiny rock. Cosmically, we are no more significant than mold on a shower curtain.” [7] Spirituality,
the sense of connectedness with something that transcends the individual self, is equated in this
view with self-deception, fantasy or hallucination. In this outlook, meaning, direction, purpose and
free will are absent.

As philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, “When we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality,
we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.” [8] 

Physicalism involves the presumption that the everyday idea of mind is an exaggerated,
unnecessary concept — that, according to linguist Karen Stollznow, “Thinking is just the meat
talking to itself. It’s generated by the brain and when we die, unfortunately that dies with us. We
can state that categorically.”[9] 

Or as philosopher Dennett says without a whiff of irony in his book Consciousness Explained,

“We’re all zombies. Nobody is conscious.”[10] And as the Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist
Francis Crick confidently proclaimed, “[A] person’s mental activities are entirely due to the
behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make up and influence
them.”[11] Similarly, astronomer Carl Sagan unequivocally stated, “[The brain’s] workings — what
we sometimes call mind — are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing
more.”[12] And as psychiatrist and sleep researcher Allan Hobson asserted, “Consciousness, like
sleep, is of the Brain, by the Brain, and for the Brain.” [13] In sum, physicalism constitutes a bleak
vision in which, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg said, “The more the universe
seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” [14]

“Beats The Heck Out of Me”

The dogma of physicalism suffers from two fatal defects: the sheer poverty of evidence that brains
produce consciousness, and the enormous human costs of a world that is sanitized of a spiritual
outlook, which the dogma forbids.

No human has ever seen a brain or anything else produce consciousness, and there is no
accepted theory as to how this could happen. This weakness is becoming obvious to an
increasing number of top-tier scientists, as the following comments show. I include several
examples to show that these are not rare, isolated opinions.

Steven A. Pinker, experimental psychologist at Harvard University, on how consciousness might

arise from something physical, such as the brain, states, “Beats the heck out of me. I have some
prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone
else.”[19] 

Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive scientist at University of California, Irvine: “The scientific study of
consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness.” [20] 

Stuart A. Kauffman, theoretical biologist and complex-systems researcher: “Nobody has the
faintest idea what consciousness is.... I don’t have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the
philosophers of mind.”[21] 

Roger W. Sperry, Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist: “Those centermost processes of the

brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so
far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine
their nature.”[22] 

Eugene P. Wigner, Nobelist in physics: “We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to
connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind.” [23] Physicist Nick Herbert, an expert
in nonlocality: “Science’s biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess
bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all
we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.” [24]

 Physicist Freeman J. Dyson: “The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of
human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve
cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.” [25] Philosopher Jerry
A. Fodor, of Rutgers University: “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be
conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything
material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness.” [26] 

Philosopher John R. Searle, of the University of California, Berkeley: “At the present state of the
investigation of consciousness we don’t know how it works and we need to try all kinds of different
ideas.”[27] Mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: “My position [on consciousness] demands a
major revolution in physics.... I’ve come to believe that there is something very fundamental
missing from current science.... Our understanding at this time is not adequate and we’re going to
have to move to new regions of science....” [28] 

Niels Bohr, one the great patriarchs of quantum physics: “We can admittedly find nothing in
physics or chemistry that has even a remote bearing on consciousness.... [Q]uite apart from the
laws of physics and chemistry, as laid down in quantum theory, we must also consider laws of
quite a different kind.”[29] 

Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield: “It will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis
of neuronal action within the brain.... Although the content of consciousness depends in large
measure on neuronal activity, awareness itself does not....To me, it seems more and more
reasonable to suggest that the mind may be a distinct and different essence.” [30] 
Sir John Maddox, the editor for[22]years of the prestigious journal Nature: “What consciousness
consists of ... is ... a puzzle. Despite the marvelous successes of neuroscience in the past
century... we seem as far from understanding cognitive process as we were a century ago.” [31

The truth is that no account of what goes on at the mechanistic level of the brain can shed any light
whatsoever on why consciousness exists. No theory can explain why the brain shouldn't work exactly as it
does, yet without giving rise to the feeling we all have of "what it is like to be." And there is, I believe, a very
simple reason for this. The brain does not produce consciousness at all, any more than a television set
creates the programs that appear on its screen. On the contrary, the brain filters and restricts
consciousness, just as our senses limit the totality of experience to which we might otherwise have
access. , n defense of their credo, physicalists often maintain that they actually prefer annihilation with
physical death to any sort of survival. Longing for immortality is seen as a defect of character or a
philosophical sellout in people too weak-willed to face their impending doom. In the face of certain
extermination, one should simply man up and go quietly, proudly and bravely into that dark night. There is a
hint of this heroic martyrdom in Lord Bertrand Russell’s famous comment, “I believe that when I die I shall
rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.... I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.

Nobel physicist Erwin Schrödinger:

Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness.
Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely
fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else[130] .... If we have to decide to
have only one sphere, it has got to be the psychic one, since that exists anyway. [131]
Max Planck, the founder of quantum mechanics:

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We

cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as
existing, postulates consciousness. [132]
Near the end of his life, Planck further said,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I
can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All
matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to
vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind
this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all
matter. [133]
Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung:

It is almost an absurd prejudice to suppose that existence can only be physical. As a matter of fact,
the only form of existence of which we have immediate knowledge is psychic. We might as well say,
on the contrary, that physical existence is a mere inference, since we know of matter only in so far
as we perceive psychic images mediated by the senses. [134]

 there is nothing about the parameters of material arrangements—say, the position and
momentum of the atoms constituting our brain—in terms of which we could deduce, at least in
principle, how it feels to fall in love, to taste wine, or to listen to a Vivaldi sonata. There is an
impassable explanatory gap between material quantities and experiential qualities, which
philosophers refer to as the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ Many people don’t recognize this
gap because they think of matter as already having intrinsic qualities—such as color, taste,
etc.—which contradicts mainstream materialism: according to the latter, color, taste, etc., are
all generated by our brain, inside our skull. They don’t exist in the world out there, which is
supposedly purely abstract.
When I am in a conscious mental state, there is something it is like for me to be in that state from the
subjective or first-person point of view. But how are we to understand this? For instance, how is the
conscious mental state related to the body? Can consciousness be explained in terms of brain activity? What
makes a mental state be a conscious mental state? The problem of consciousness is arguably the most
central issue in current philosophy of mind and is also importantly related to major traditional topics in
metaphysics, such as the possibility of immortality and the belief in free will.
it is often said that materialism cannot truly explain just how or why some brain states are conscious, and
that there is an important “explanatory gap” between mind and matter. On the other hand, dualism faces
the problem of explaining how a non-physical substance or mental state can causally interact with the
physical body.
“what it is like to be a bat.” It will not do to imagine what it is like for us to be a bat. We would still not know
what it is like to be a bat from the bat’s subjective or first-person point of view. The idea, then, is that if we
accept the hypothesis that we know all of the physical facts about bat minds, and yet some knowledge about
bat minds is left out, then materialism is inherently flawed when it comes to explaining consciousness.

Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can emerge from a grey, jelly-
like lump of tissue in the head is arguably the greatest scientific challenge of our time.
The brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, consisting of almost 100 billion cells –
known as neurons – each connected to 10,000 others, yielding some ten trillion nerve
connections.

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it
contributes to human behaviour. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how
all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of
electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an
experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able

answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be
able to crack the mystery.

For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious
inner world of consciousness – it was not taken to be a fitting topic for “serious
science”. Things have changed a lot, and there is now broad agreement that the problem
of consciousness is a serious scientific issue. But many consciousness researchers
underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue
examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce
consciousness.

The problem of consciousness, however, is radically unlike any other scientific problem.
One reason is that consciousness is unobservable. You can’t look inside someone’s head
and see their feelings and experiences. If we were just going off what we can observe
from a third-person perspective, we would have no grounds for postulating
consciousness at all.

Of course, scientists are used to dealing with unobservables. Electrons, for example, are
too small to be seen. But scientists postulate unobservable entities in order to explain
what we observe, such as lightning or vapour trails in cloud chambers. But in the
unique case of consciousness, the thing to be explained cannot be observed. We know
that consciousness exists not through experiments but through our immediate
awareness of our feelings and experiences.

Only you can experience your emotions. Olga Danylenko

So how can science ever explain it? When we are dealing with the data of observation,
we can do experiments to test whether what we observe matches what the theory
predicts. But when we are dealing with the unobservable data of consciousness, this
methodology breaks down. The best scientists are able to do is to correlate
unobservable experiences with observable processes, by scanning people’s brains and
relying on their reports regarding their private conscious experiences.

By this method, we can establish, for example, that the invisible feeling of hunger is
correlated with visible activity in the brain’s hypothalamus. But the accumulation of
such correlations does not amount to a theory of consciousness. What we ultimately
want is to explain why conscious experiences are correlated with brain activity. Why is
it that such activity in the hypothalamus comes along with a feeling of hunger?