这里和大家分享澳洲哲学家和认知科学家(Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist )大卫查默斯(David Chalmers)在TED talk中的演讲:
1. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness.
科学本质上是客观的。意识本质上是主观的。所以永远不可能有一种意识的科学。
2. I am a scientific materialist at heart, I want a scientific theory of consiousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall, looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work, but i eventually come to the conclusion, that that just didn't work for systematic reasons.
3. ...what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems - how we behave how we function - but when it comes to subjective experience - why does all this feel like something from the inside? that's something fundamentally new, and it's always a further question. So i think we're at a kind of impasse here.
4. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology, but consciousness, doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum, that we're conscious, on the other hand, we don't know how to accomodate it into our scientific view of the world. So i think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how?
5. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and i think that we may need one or two ideas, that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically. Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be ... in the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that i think may have some promise. The first crazy idea is that concciousness is fundamental. Physicist sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space, time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they'are taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there. Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands.
6. In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals - space, time, mass, Newton's laws - so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism, and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element of those laws govern. I think that's the situation we're in with consciousness. If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals - space, time, mass, charge - then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn't mean you suddenly can't do science with it, this opens up the way for you to do science with it.