Jaan Aru is a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt and a researcher at the Talis Bachmann Lab in Estonia, where he investigates how the neural machinery of the brain produces conscious experience. See more about Jaan’s research interests.
When I open your skull, I see neurons and the web of their connections. I can measure fluctuating membrane potentials, neurons firing, neurotransmitters being released to the synaptic cleft, ion channels opening, etc. You are a machine – a very complicated machine, but nevertheless a machine.
Yet from the first-person perspective, from the inside, you do not feel like a machine. It feels like something to be you, to be afraid, to feel joy. You have consciousness. How do these two perspectives – the machine and the subjective experience – fit together? How does the neuronal machinery create consciousness of oneself and the surrounding world? Our current laws of nature give no explanation for the question as to how matter could become mind. Although consciousness is “everything we have and everything we are”, we do not know how it is produced by the neurobiological processes in the brain.
Neural correlates of consciousness. Image credit: Christof Koch / Wikimedia Commons
