Science and religion reviews

[sawyl]

Today's Guardian featured a good review by Georgina Ferry of three books about the history of computing. Also good was Bruce Lawrence's rather beautiful essay on the Qur'an.

The sketch of Nicholas Humphrey's work was also fascinating, especially the short section dealing with his theory of consciousness:

Yet, at the same time, he was developing a new and more complex theory of consciousness, which puts something like the soul at the centre of human existence. In his new theory the clue to the "hard problem" of consciousness - the problem of why and how minds appear from matter - is attacked head-on. The fact that we find it so difficult and so threatening to believe, as he says, "that there is nothing more to human experience than the churning of chemicals and electrons within the brain" seems to him to contain the kernel of the solution to the hard problem. If it is so difficult for us to think that way, then the difficulty might in some sense have been designed by natural selection.

Human beings, he writes, "have a self that seems to inhabit a separate universe of spiritual being. As the subjects of something so mysterious and strange, we humans gain new confidence and interest in our own survival, a new interest in other people, too. This feeds right back to our biological fitness, in both obvious and subtle ways. It makes us more fascinating and more fascinated, more determined to pursue lives wherever they will take us. In short, more like the amazing piece of work that humans are."

Intriguing stuff, especially so given my current interest in religion and the philosophy of the mind.