Hall of Mirrors

The Consciousness Conundrum Continues

To contemplate consciousness is, as professor of religion Greg Peterson put it, like looking into and out of a window at the same time.¹ Brain imaging was supposed to dissolve the hard problem of consciousness, but new information and insights have only deepened it.²

One quest has been to discover the seat of consciousness—the specific bit of the brain that spews out the unthinking electrical charges that create it. Seat? But wait, isn’t consciousness the table? You see the difficulty, of course . . .

It’s a long and winding road. For example, functional MRI imaging only tells researchers where blood is traveling in the brain. The problem is, as a Duke...