Page 80 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

in one or another sensory cortex. Not even the most detailed fMRI
gives us more than the physical basis of perception or awareness; it
doesn’t come close to explaining what it feels like from the inside. It
doesn’t explain the first-person feeling of red. How do we know that
it is the same for different people? And why would studying brain
mechanisms, even down to the molecular level, ever provide an an-
swer to those questions? 45
Peter Russell has described the problem in these terms:

Every time we try to pin down the physical aspect we come away
empty-handed. Every idea we have had of the physical has proven
to be wrong, and the notion of materiality seems to be evaporating
before our eyes. But our belief in the material world is so deeply en-
grained—and so powerfully reinforced by our experience—that we
cling to our assumption that there must be some physical essence.
Like the medieval astronomers who never questioned their assump-
tion that the Earth was the center of the universe, we never question
our assumption that the external world is physical in nature. Indeed
it was quite startling to me when I realized that the answer might be
staring us straight in the face. Maybe there really is nothing there. No
“thing,” that is. No physical aspect. Maybe there is only a mental as-
pect to everything. 46
Research into the brain can never answer questions regarding
who or what does the perceiving, because what scientists are seek-
ing in the brain is actually something very different from human
beings’ physical bodies—something that exists in their own identi-
ty.
American author Marilyn Ferguson notes this important
search in the world of science and philosophy for who or what it is
that performs such perceiving:
Philosophers since the Greeks have speculated about the “ghost in
the machine” the “little man inside the little man” and so on. Where
is the I—the entity that uses the brain?

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