TED Talk--Consciousness

Consciousness We are all conscious. Every person in this room has conscious thought, an internal monologue that talks to us throughout the day, and I guarantee every person in this room is listening to their own inner monologue right now. Now, each individual in this room understands how their own mind works because we know how we think and how we feel. But we confuse this with understanding what consciousness is. Many individuals believe they are experts on consciousness simply because we are all conscious. The truth though, is that scientists have been trying to uncover the mystery of the conscious mind for years. How do we perceive the smell of a rose or the color purple and why do we perceive them differently? The answers to these questions and more lay within the unexplored world of the conscious mind. As far as consciousness science has come in the past decade, there is still no one who knows exactly how or why it works. Explaining it exactly would be as difficult as trying to understand the properties of a black hole. It cannot be dissected. Little to no tests can be performed on it. It is still a very abstract concept to us. This is why we have many different theories attempting to explain how consciousness works. The first theory is called the Fundamental Theory. There are certain things in this universe that everything can be broken down into; they are the building blocks of the world around us. Mass, time, space, and Newton’s laws are a few. So consciousness must break down into one of these categories as well, except it doesn’t. No matter how many studies are done on the brain, neuroscientists are not finding a solid link to consciousness, which makes figuring out how it works pretty difficult. David Chalmers, a professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Consciousness at Australian National University, and Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University suggests, “If you