‘Darwin Versus Deepak’: Which Came First, Feelings, or the Brain?.

Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ is taken to imply (e.g. Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish gene’) that behavior of living organisms promotes their genetic survival through reproductive success. However humans and animals appear to be driven by conscious feelings (e.g. ‘Epicurean delight’, Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’, ‘dopaminergic reward’). In criticizing Deepak’s position, Mr. Newton says: “When I think about the natural world, consciousness is not the first thing that springs to mind. I think instead of organisms frantically killing and eating other organisms,…”

Organisms kill and eat other organisms because they taste good, hunger feels bad, and getting eaten feels even worse. Conscious feelings drive behavior which serves evolution. Mr. Newton’s error is ignoring consciousness.

What is consciousness? How does the brain, a lump of pinkish-gray meat, produce feelings, emotions, understanding and awareness (a question termed the ‘hard problem’ by philosopher David Chalmers)? The mystery has been pondered since ancient times, and currently approached from many disciplines, e.g. neuroscience, medicine, philosophy, psychology, physics, biology, cosmology, the arts, meditative and spiritual traditions, etc. All these have something to say, but from different directions, like the proverbial blind men describing an elephant. Moreover consciousness cannot be directly measured, observed nor verified, a problem in my field of anesthesiology where we want our patients to be decidedly unconscious. How do we even study consciousness scientifically?

In 1994 I co-organized the first international, interdisciplinary conference ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ at the University of Arizona in Tucson, bringing together all approaches under one umbrella, or more accurately perhaps, one circus tent. After some confusion, the interdisciplinary concept took hold, thanks largely to a famous talk the opening morning by David Chalmers.

The audience was restless after two boring lectures when Dave took the stage. With waist-length hair, strutting like Mick Jagger, he explained that brain functions like memory, learning, language and behavior were difficult, but still relatively easy compared to the really ‘hard problem’ of subjective experience, feelings, emotions, awareness, thinking, composed of raw components termed ‘qualia’. Moreover he offered his own view that qualia were somehow ‘funda-mental’, akin to basic features of the universe like electrical charge, magnetic spin, photons or mass, and that there must exist some ‘psycho-physical bridge’ between brain activities and a basic level of the universe. The audience buzzed. At the coffee break I eavesdropped on chatter about the ‘hard problem’.

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