The first known scientific account relating consciousness to the brain dates back to Hippocrates in the fifth century b.c. At that time, there was no formal science as it is recognized today. Hippocrates was nonetheless an acute medical observer and noticed that people with brain damage tended to lose their mental abilities. He realized that mind is something created by the brain and that it dies piece by piece as the brain dies. A passage attributed to him summarizes his view elegantly:


"Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant."

The importance of Hippocrates’s insight that the brain is the source of the mind cannot be overstated. It launched two and a half thousand years of neuroscience. As a specific explanation of consciousness, however, one has to admit that the Hippocratic account is not very helpful. Rather than explain consciousness, the account merely points to a magician. The brain makes it happen. How the brain does it, and what exactly consciousness may be, Hippocrates left unaddressed. Such questions went beyond the scope of his medical observations.

Two thousand years after Hippocrates, in 1641, Descartes proposed a second influential view of the brain basis of consciousness. In Descartes’s view, the mind was made out of an ethereal substance, a fluid, that was stored in a receptacle in the brain. He called the fluid rescogitans. Mental substance. When he dissected the brain looking for the receptacle of the soul, he noticed that almost every brain structure came in pairs, one on each side. In his view, the human soul was a single, unified entity, and therefore it could not possibly be divided up and stored in two places. In the end he found a small single lump at the center of the brain, the pineal body, and deduced that it must be the house of the soul. The pineal body is now known to be a gland that produces melatonin and has nothing whatsoever to do with a soul
Descartes’ idea, though refreshingly clever for the time, and though influential in philosophy and theology, did not advance the scientific understanding of consciousness. Instead of proposing an explanation of consciousness, he attributed consciousness to a magic fluid. By what mechanism a fluid substance can cause the experience of consciousness, or where the fluid itself comes from, Descartes left unexplained— truly a case of pointing to a magician instead of explaining the trick.
One of the foundation bricks of modern science, especially modern psychology, is a brilliant treatise so heft y that it is literally rather brick-like, Kant’s A Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781. In Kant’s account, the mind relies on what he termed “a priori forms,” abilities and ideas within us that are present first before all explanations and from which everything else follows. On the subject of consciousness, therefore, Kant had a clear answer: there is no explaining the magic. It is simply supplied to us by divine act. Quite literally, the magician did it.
Hippocrates, Descartes, and Kant represent only three particularly prominent accounts of the mind from the history of science. I could go on describing one famous account after the next and yet get no closer to insight. Even if we fast-forward to modern neuroscience and examine the many proposed theories of consciousness, almost all of them suffer from the same limitation. They are not truly explanatory theories. They point to a magician but do not explain the magic.

One of the first, groundbreaking neurobiological theories of consciousness was proposed in 1990 by the scientists Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) and Christof Koch. They suggested that when the electrical signals in the brain oscillate they cause consciousness. The idea goes something like this: the brain is composed of neurons that pass information among each other. Information is more efficiently linked from one neuron to another, and more efficiently maintained over short periods of time, if the electrical signals of neurons oscillate in synchrony. Therefore, consciousness might be caused by the electrical activity of many neurons oscillating together.

This theory has some plausibility. Maybe neuronal oscillations are a precondition for consciousness. But note that, once again, the hypothesis is not truly an explanation of consciousness. It identifies a magician. Like the Hippocratic account, “The brain does it” (which is probably true), or like Descartes’s account, “The magic fluid inside the brain does it” (which is probably false), this modern theory stipulates that “the oscillations in the brain do it.” We still don’t know how. Suppose that neuronal oscillations do actually enhance the reliability of information processing. That is impressive and on recent evidence apparently likely to be true. But by what logic does that enhanced information processing cause the inner experience? Why an inner feeling? Why should information in the brain—no matter how much its signal strength is boosted, improved, maintained, or integrated from brain site to brain site—become associated with any subjective experience at all? Why is it not just information without the add-on of awareness?

For this type of reason, many thinkers are pessimistic about ever finding an explanation of consciousness. This is an excerpt from the new bookConsciousness and the Social Brain by Michael S. A. Graziano (Oxford University Press, 2015):

How does sensory awareness become rational though. Or thought at all, for that matter. They know what the brain is doing, but how does that translate into consciousness?

But consider the fact that this phony statistic was offered here in the Gulch as if it were actual content. MMinnick now disparages modern education, but MMinnick did not perceive the gross errors in the news article. So, is MMinnick an illiterate tweeter? Or is there a deeper and broader narrative that you (and the other MM) ignore? In other words: Things are not as bad you claim. If they were, even that pie-in-the-sky "news" would be impossible.

Can Atlas Shrugged be reduced to a tweet? What is the essence of the story? "I swear by my life and my love of it never to live for the sake, of another man or ask another man to live for mine." (116 characters) In fewer chars: "I swear never to live for another or ask anyone to live for me."

Lol. Very true and emphasized by college performance...

I think you gentlemen are being way too optimistic. The average student today has the initiative and capacity to read
"Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" beaten out of them by their sophomore year. The students are not taught to think on their own, they are taught to follow the dictates of the teacher and of society, no matter how stupid they are.
I talk with my grand children about this and how they should think for themselves. My daughters are both educated and know how to think for themselves and are working with their children to make sure they follow in the same path but it is difficult. My oldest has learned it, the younger ones are getting the hang of it, but it is difficult because most of their friends and acquaintances don't think for themselves but follow group think patterns.

It would need to be 1.2 pages long as opposed to 1200+. It wasnt even popular as a movie (although AS2 and AS3 werent up to the current movie standards