Page 154 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

an observer. And yet, we all have this experience of being something
called an observer, observing the world out there. 97

Scientists now realize that the brain is not the source of per-
ceptions, and that it merely serves as a vehicle. Furthermore, scien-
tists have entirely abandoned the idea that prevailed centuries ago
of the “little man inside the brain.” Scientists have clearly seen that
the entity they refer to as the “observer” is entirely independent of
the brain. They now know that the source of perceptions is human
consciousness.
In his book Closer to Truth: Challenging Current Belief, Robert
Lawrence Kuhn offers this description:
Why are some physicists suddenly so interested in human mind? Is
mind as real as matter? A few have even begun wondering whether
mind may be the “real reality” and matter a deceptive illusion. What
is it about mental activities that causes such smart people offer such
wild speculations? Part of the reason is the weird implications of two
fundamental theories that have changed forever our sense of reality:
quantum mechanics, which injects uncertainty into the subatomic
scale, and relativity, which unifies space and time on the large-scale
structure of the universe. But can theories of physics explain mecha-
nisms of the mind? Can the behavior of atoms determine the behav-
ior of people? Can the structure of
the universe describe how
we think, feel, and
know? 98

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