Consciousness and Francis Harry Compton Crick (2) Consciousness does not appear in the equations that make up the foundations of physics, nor in chemistry’s periodic table, nor in the endless ATGC molecular sequences of our genes. In philosophy, the difficulty of explaining why somebody can feel anything is often referred to as the Hard Problem. The term was coined by the philosopher David Chalmers. He made his reputation in the early 1990s by a closely argued chain of reasoning, leading him to conclude that conscious experience does not follow from the physical laws that rule the universe. I started studying the mind–body problem with Francis Crick, the physical chemist who, with James Watson, discovered the double-helical structure of DNA, the molecule of heredity, in 1953. It was lauded with a Nobel Prize in 1962. When that goal was achieved, Francis’s interest shifted from molecular biology to neurobiology. In 1976, at the age of sixty, he plunged into this new field while simultaneously moving from Cambridge in the Old World to California in the New World. Over sixteen years, Francis and I wrote two dozen scientific papers and essays together. All of them focused on the anatomy and physiology of the primate brain and their link to consciousness. As a theoretician, Francis’s methods of inquiry were quiet thinking, daily reading of the relevant literature —he could absorb prodigious amounts of it—and the Socratic dialogue. He had an unquenchable thirst for details, numbers, and facts. He would ceaselessly put hypotheses together to explain something, then reject most of them himself. In the morning, he usually bombarded me with some bold new hypothesis that had come to him in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep. Francis was an intellectual giant, with the clearest and deepest mind I have ever met. He could take the same information as anybody else, read the same papers, yet come up with a totally novel question or inference. The neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, a good friend of us both, recollects that the experience of meeting Francis was “a little like sitting next to an intellectual nuclear reactor . . . . I never had a feeling of such incandescence.” Equally remarkable was how approachable Francis was. No celebrity attitude for him. He was willing to talk to anybody, from lowly undergraduate student to fellow Nobel laureate, provided that the interlocutor brought him interesting facts and observations, a startling proposal, or some question he had never previously considered. It is true that he would quickly lose patience with people who spouted nonsense or didn’t understand why their reasoning was wrong, but he was one of the most open-minded savants I have ever known. (Excerpt from Consciousness, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist byChristof Koch)
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 23:33:47 +0000
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