How can the human brain, consisting of about 100 billion neurons, each linked with ten thousand others, generate awareness?
Explaining how something as complex as consciousness can arise from a gray gel-like mass in tissues is the greatest scientific challenge of our time. The brain is a very complex organ made up of about 100 billion cells - known as neurons - that link each other with 10,000 other cells and produce about 10 trillion nerves.
Why do we need the philosophy of science?
My knowledge progressed, but it remained minor
We have made a lot of progress in understanding brain activity and how it contributes to human behavior, but what no one has yet been able to explain is how all of this leads to feelings, emotions, and experiences, how the passage of electrical and chemical signals between nerve cells leads to pain or a red experience ?
There are increasing doubts that traditional scientific methods will not be able to answer these questions, but fortunately there is an alternative approach that may eventually be able to solve that mystery.
Many taboos in front of science
Much of the twentieth century has passed since there were many great taboos against inquiring about the mysterious inner world of consciousness - it was not considered a suitable subject for "serious science". Things have changed a lot, and there is now a great consensus that the consciousness problem is a serious scientific problem, but many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to see how consciousness is produced.
However, the awareness problem is not radically different from any other scientific problem, one of the reasons is that awareness is not noticeable. You cannot look inside a person's head and see his feelings and experiences. If we ignore what can be observed from a third-person perspective, we have no reason to concede that awareness exists at all.
