Time Magazine; January 29, 2007; The Mystery of Consciousness, Steven Pinker; pages 58-70
the feature [neuroscientists] find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it the astonishing hypothesis; the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
Scientists have exorcised the ghost from the machine not because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain.
Another startling conclusion from the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that theres an executive I that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process out-shouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.
Whether The Creator used evolutionary processes to produce our existence is up for grabs because the scientific method is useless in determining its validity. Evolutionary science was a wake-up call, however; a wake-up call which free-will based fundamentalist theologies responded to by hunkering down and honing their whistles.
Brain science is subject to the scientific method. Brain science is not evolutionary science. Brain science is provable. Brain science places man well within the parameters of hard determinism. Brain science will not go away. Brain science must be dealt with, like it or not. Theological thought will harmonize with current brain science thought, or simply fade away. The reality of God and Jesus will take the route of Santa Claus, the Boogeyman and the Easter Bunny.
Following is a no holds barred, hard nosed, attempt at comprehending the incomprehensible in light of this new brain research. It must be read with much humility as it appears somewhere along the line, someone was mistaken.
