Can consciousness ever be modelled?

摘要

After numerous ups and downs, the question of the title has become accepted as belonging legitimately to the lexicon of interesting scientific problems. This is a very important step forward in any scientific attempt to understand the total Universe, and especially our own place in it. However up to now a satisfactory answer has not been forthcoming, at least one acceptable to all who hear it. That may be due to the difficulty of any model being rigorously tested, as befits any decent scientific model. But even the nature of such tests is uncertain, since the data are also uncertain. This must include data on brain imaging activity as well as single cell activity: this is the brain sciences hard data. But at the same time there is the psychological data: what a subject experiences in a given experiment, such as what they see or feel as others might be gathering the data on the activity in their brains. So both the inside and the outside - the 1^st and 3^rd person perspectives on the human condition - are being probed by science.