The Enigma of Consciousness

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What is consciousness? What is its hallmark? When people talk of consciousness, are they talking about the same thing? Does consciousness arise from physical processes in the brain, or is it simply a figment of our imagination- nothing more and nothing less than the processes themselves? Or, is there something in the nature of consciousness that is not exactly explained by such processes and calls for some new explanation, hitherto not envisaged in any of our known subjects of science? Is consciousness a part of Nature, governed by her universal laws? If so, how is it that consciousness is also our only access to the natural world including itself? Is consciousness a prized possession of Homo sapiens only?

Alok Bhattacharyya's The Engima of Consciousness is an incisive, brilliant and perhaps the most comprehensive study of consciousness with a stunning range of topics that has ever been undertaken to answer these and other intriguing questions. Written in a lucid and impressive style with a rare clarity of approach, the book chronicles the thoughts of the world's greatest minds on a perennial problem of philosophy and a current preoccupation of science since the times of the Upanishads and Plato. The author assembles a rich set of results from recent researches in the fields of neurobiology, genetics, palaeontology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, experimental psychology, quantum physics and the new science of complexity, and critically examines if scientific bootstrapping can indeed capture consciousness in its true element and unravel its mystery. He also takes the readers on a scintillating tour of the other world, ruled by parapsychological phenomena, occult practices and mystical experiences, to explore if these extra-ordinary phenomena, lying outside the range of our everyday experience and beyond rational explanation, can provide any new insight into the nature of consciousness.

The object of the author in this book is not to 'show the fly the way out of the fly bottle', but to inform the readers where exactly we stand at the turn of this new millennium in our attempt to find a solution to the old riddle of consciousness. In the author's view, the nature of consciousness has proved too elusive to be encapsulated in any theoretical framework.

Alok Bhattacharyya is a former civil servant. Born in 1941 at Barrackpore in West Bengal, he was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta and obtained a First Class Hounours degree in Statistics from the University of Calcutta. A freelancer, he has contributed thought-provoking articles on a wide range of topics to a number of academic journals and periodicals. His book in Bengali, Adhunik Darshan O Rabindranath (Firma KLM Pvt. Ltd., 1980), a treatise on the philosophy of the Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore, was highly acclaimed by eminent Bengali literary critics. In his retired life, he is pursuing his old interest in philosophy, physics and cosmology.

Consciousness was a tabooed subject in scientific circles only half a century back. It was not simply talked about in lecture theatres of the faculties of science, let alone investigated in biological laboratories of universities anywhere in the world. Legend has it and it may not after all be an apocryphal one - that Paul Dirac, the eminent exponent of quantum physics and Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, used to frown his associates into silence when they talked about consciousness. Until recently, consciousness was considered an exclusive preserve of philosophers and psychologists. Science and consciousness have also long been considered antithetical to each other. But science has come a long way since the heydays of Dirac. Philosophy has also come out of the cocoon of discourses on either intractable or non-sensical problems concerning the epistemological questions and the nature of reality, thanks to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the language philosophers of the Vienna circle, Karl Popper and other new philosophers of science, who dominated the philosophical stage for most part of the twentieth century. The enormous advance of particle physics, cosmology, molecular biology, neuroscience and computer technology has changed the face of science in the second half of the just-concluded century. Consciousness is now well within the reach of scientific studies, and it is no longer considered an untouchable subject by scientists of various disciplines. Whether scientific studies, especially those based on neuroscience, cognitive science and quantum physics, can solve the philosophical puzzle of consciousness is a critical issue to be discussed in this book. Nevertheless, the science of consciousness is now a distinct possibility, if not already a fledgling discipline. A few titles authored by some eminent scientists of our time and published in the last two decades bear eloquent testimony to this contention.