Towards a Science of Consciousness

Abstract

Reading Paul Davies recent book The New Physics [6], one cannot help but marvel at the immense success of modern physics in describing the physical world. Yet that very success leads one reviewer [9] to pause and consider where amongst the successes ``may lurk some tiny murkiness destined to become the seed of the next scientific revolution'' just as the quantum behaviour of light turned out to be the seed which overthrew classical physics. Davies himself notes that the role of consciousness in a quantum observation still remains an unresolved issue, ``..it may be that this frontier --- the interface of mind and matter --- will turn out to be the most challenging legacy of the New Physics.'' [6, p6]