Is Consciousness Physical?: Week 4, Post 10-

I believe that, at first glance, before we take a deeper look into our “physical” universe, everything seems, as we put it, “physical”. However, my inner most belief is that everything comes down to a sort of mathematical reality or equation that in and of itself is formless. All of it combined however makes up what we sense as a physical realm, almost like the movie “The Matrix”. That is how I perceive the world. However, that is just my hypothesis. Growing up, in one way or another, we were taught in many ways by society and our family members that we each have a “soul,” some mysterious “ghost” in the machine so to speak, that may or may not go to heaven when we are done on earth depending on how morally we lived our lives. I, being the logical thinker that I am, never really quiet understood what that meant. I always wondered, “Where is it located in our bodies, this soul?” “What is it made up of?” It just never quite made sense to me.
Philosophical Thinkers such as, Crick, Edelman, Ramachandran, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and John Searle are all people who believe there is a sort of logical explanation to what our conscious is. To them, as I agree with, we are nothing more than an extravagant set of neurons and neural synapses which create our consciousness. On the contrary, there are many people in the world like Ken Wilber, who believe that there is something more to our consciousness then just neural firings. But of course, like everything in life, I do not believe it comes down to an either or type of deal but rather a mix of the two. A more systematic reductionist approach like Crick’s is ideal to lead to more hard evidence of a physical answer but Wilber’s idea of the 4 quadrants presents a nice base for a new set of experiments we need to analyze and come to conclusions on.