‘Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive subject; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.’ So wrote the psychologist Stuart Sutherland in his Dictionary of Psychology in 1989.
Two decades on, Sutherland’s sardonic view remains widely held by psychologists and philosophers. Consciousness has an ineffable quality that appears to be beyond the reach of the rational method of science. As the philosopher Nakita Newton has put it: ‘Nothing else is like it in any way at all.’
If this is true, Nicholas Humphrey observes, ‘we might as well give up at once’ trying to understand the nature of conscious experience.
more from Telegraph here (via TPM online).