March 2024
Delving into consciousness research is sometimes a strange experience. Consciousness is the most self-evident thing in life, yet its essence escapes modern science. When science does try to explain it, it quickly becomes convoluted.
In a new article in Frontiers in Psychology, neurobiologist Bruno Forti refreshingly acknowledges that research in recent decades has “failed to bridge the explanatory gap between the brain and conscious mind”, simply because direct experience and neural structure are too different to be directly compatible.
In what appears as a mind twister, Forti wants to seek the structure of consciousness not in the brain strata but in consciousness itself, namely through analysing the simplest aspects of experience, which can be found in early vision.
“This is a first step of a phenomenal analysis that I will develop further elsewhere, hypothesising a hidden structure of consciousness.”
Forti’s hypothesis is that the structure of consciousness is “somehow conscious, although ‘hidden’ from consciousness itself”. Finding this hidden structure, he thinks, might help us solve the hard problem.
FJN cannot help but wonder if perhaps poetry would be the proper language in which to approach the essence of life in a more pertinent way.
Anders Bolling
Frontier Journalists' Network 