The Problem of Consciousness and Science
In the most simple terms consciousness refers to the unified sense of awareness that we all have of who we are and what we are. It is the unique subjective inner world that we all experience during our daily lives. When we examine the brain it is perhaps not surprising to see why there has been so much interest in determining the nature of the self in recent times. Most people look at the brain in awe, and rightly so. Just the sight of it is immensely awe-inspiring. It is a mysterious pinkish grey organ pulsating with every heartbeat and many modern scientists have argued that 'the self must be contained somewhere within the functions of this mystifying pinkish/grey organ. In other words the 'me' who is standing in front of the mirror is nothing more than a product of the hustle and bustle of electrical and chemical processes within brain cells.

Common Theories of Consciousness
The common views for its occurrence can be divided into conventional, and non-conventional neurobiological theories.

Thoughts and the brain
Science has largely got to grips with the mechanisms that lead to various signals and messages being transmitted in the brain and the connections between the brain and the rest of the body. But the 'problem of consciousness' or 'the self' lies in understanding where in the midst of all this electrical activity and chemical processes do thoughts and essentially 'the self' lie? How does the passage of electricity across a cell lead to the subjective inner world that we experience everyday?

This is the problem that has baffled philosophers, psychologists and scientists throughout the ages. David Chalmers, an Australian philosopher, has summarized the problem very well: 'Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain.' He has called this the 'hard problem' of consciousness. This is in contrast to the 'easy problems', which essentially involve understanding the mechanisms that allow the brain to deal with the various sets of information that it receives. These are the processes that scientists have largely discovered so far.

Conventional Brain Based Theories
It has commonly been proposed that mind and consciousness are products of neuronal activity and arise from brain activity. Conceptually, this is similar to how light arises from a light bulb, but isn't the same as the underlying processes taking place within the light bulb. A number of different theories have been proposed to account for this phenomenon, which portray consciousness as an emergent property of brain cell activity in the brain. Specifically it has been proposed that consciousness, may arise

• 1) where brain cells connect together
• 2) Through a synchronous activity of brain cell networks in the brain and
• 3) as a novel property of computational complexity among brain cells.

It is further argued that brain cells and their chemical connections are the fundamental units of information in the brain, and that conscious experience emerges when a critical level of complexity is reached in the networks of brain cells. Evidence to support these theories have come from the observation that specific changes in function such as personality or memory are associated with specific brain injury, such that people with specific head injuries or brain tumours may lose certain aspects of their consciousness. In addition, special scanning devices such as fMRI and PET scanning have also shown a correlation between activity of brain cells and different mental states. These have shown that when someone has a specific thought groups of brain cells may become active, as measured through their use of oxygen or glucose. Although, these provide evidence for the role of brain cell networks as an intermediary for the manifestation of thoughts, they do not necessarily imply that those cells also produce the thoughts (See- ARE NDE REAL? - NEUROLOGY AND NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE).

Many have argued that these theories cannot fully explain the observed features of consciousness. Their limitations can be divided into four broad categories and involve a lack of mechanisms to account for the occurrence of:

• 1) The nature of subjective experience, in other words how do thoughts somehow arise from chemical processes in the brain cells
• 2)The binding of activities that are taking place all over the brain into unitary objects such as consciousness or vision. If we take the example of vision, when we look at something this involves more than 30 areas of the brain that are spread in many different parts of the brain. How then do all these different processes bind into a single conscious state of seeing something?
• 3) Transition from pre-conscious processes to consciousness itself: How do chemical processes that are not conscious events lead to a conscious state?
• 4) Free will. We all have free will and we use it in our everyday lives to make decisions, however if everything to do with our consciousness was determined by brain cell activity then how do we have free will to chose. Everything should be predetermined. These have led to alternative explanations for consciousness.

The Problem of Consciousness - Some Limitations with Conventional Brain Based Theories
In general the evidence to back up the theory that mind and consciousness may arise from the brain has come from the clinical observation that specific changes in function such as personality or memory are associated with specific areas of damage to the brain, such as those that occur after head injury or a stroke. This finding has been further supported by the results of studies using functional MRI and PET scanning, in which, as described above, specific areas of the brain have been shown to become active in response to a thought or feeling. However, although these studies provide evidence for the role of networks of brain cells as an intermediary for the manifestation of thoughts, they do not necessarily imply that those cells also produce the thoughts (maybe add about correlation). In fact today due to a number of significant limitations, many scientists have argued that brain-based theories alone cannot fully explain the observed features of 'the self'. These limitations can be summarized into four broad categories:

1. The nature of subjective experience
The most obvious limitation of such theories is that they do not provide a plausible mechanism that may account for the development of 'the self' from brain cell activity. The theories simply propose potential intermediary pathways that may be mediating consciousness but do not answer the fundamental question of how subjective experiences may arise from the activity of brain cells. This is a point that has been summarized very well by the well known University of Oxford neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield. Even though she supports a brain based theory, in one of her articles she nevertheless concludes: '.just how the bump and grind of the neurones and the shrinking and expanding of assemblies actually translate into subjective experience - is, of course, another story completely.'

2. The binding of spatially distributed brain activities into unitary objects such as consciousness
How do brain activities that are distributed within multiple areas of the brain bind into a unitary sense, such as occurs with vision, or the development of a coherent sense of self? In other words, how do we go from multiple inputs from millions of brain cells to a single picture or a single sensation of the self?

3. Transition from pre-conscious processes to consciousness itself
The theories proposed do not account for how an event that is pre-conscious (in other words chemical or electrical events that are going on in our body but we are not 'conscious' of) becomes conscious, other than to say that it 'somehow' occurs at a critical point.

4. Free will
A fundamental part of our lives involves the notion of free will. We are judged in society based upon our intentions and actions and the brain-based views expressed above cannot account for this. If correct, they would mean that our lives would be completely determined by our genes and environment and hence there would be no place for personal accountability. Can you imagine the situation that would arise if everyone claimed that everything they did was due to the action of their genes in combination with their environment? No one could really be held accountable any more! Thankfully, society still runs with the notion of free will and personal accountability.

These and other limitations with the conventional views have led some scientists to seek alternative explanations for consciousness.

The Problem of Consciousness - Non-Conventional Theories

Quantum Processes
Stuart Hameroff, an anesthetist at the University of Arizona, and Roger Penrose, a mathematician from the University of Cambridge, have raised many of the limitations of the conventional brain based theories above. In particular they argue that the conventional brain based theories cannot fully explain the observed features of 'the self'. They further argue that there are single-celled organisms such as ameba that, despite lacking brain cells or brain cell connections (synapses) are able to swim, find food, learn and multiply. Hence they suggest that there must be a different mechanism other than the activity of brain cells and their connections with each other that leads to a sense of self.

They propose that perhaps very small protein structures called mictotubules that are found in all cells whether simple single celled organisms such as ameba (who thus do not have a separate brain) or the most complex organisms such as humans may be what leads to conscious awareness and thoughts - or in other words 'the self'. Furthermore they argue that consciousness is thus not a product of direct brain cell to cell activity, but rather the action of processes occurring in the smallest possible level within the microtubules of brain cells- the subatomic level - where things are even smaller than atoms (see subatomic physics and possible nature consciousness).

The theory proposed by Hameroff and Penrose however still fails to answer the fundamental question of how subjective experiences and thought processes arise. Some have, however, also argued against their theory by pointing out that microtubules exist in all cells throughout the body and not just in the brain. Also there are drugs that can damage the structure of micotubules but appear to have no effect on consciousness.

Non-Conventional Theories of Consciousness
The history of science is full of examples of situations in which scientists have been confronted with seemingly unsolvable problems using the scientific principles of the time. For example when the British scientist Maxwell first discovered electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century, electromagnetism had to be described as a scientific entity in its own right, as it could not be explained according to known scientific principles. It was many years later that the first radio waves (which are electromagnetic waves) were recorded by the German scientist Hertz and now we have a whole area of science that is based upon them, not to mention numerous devices such as radio, television, microwaves and infrared cameras.

Some scientists have also suggested that consciousness or the self, too, is at present not reducible in terms of currently understood mechanisms of brain cell activity and its true nature may only be discovered when our science progresses further.

The limitations of all the theories mentioned above has thus led to the suggestion that consciousness or the self may in fact be an irreducible scientific entity in its own right, similar to many of the concepts in physics, such as mass and gravity, which have also been irreducible entities. The investigation into consciousness and the self has thus been proposed to be similar to the discovery of electromagnetic phenomena in the nineteenth century or quantum mechanics in the twentieth century, both of which were inexplicable in terms of previously known principles.

Some, such as David Chalmers, have argued that this new irreducible scientific entity is a product of the brain, whereas others have argued that it is an entirely separate entity that is not produced by the brain.

The late Sir John Eccles, a neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963 for his work on brain cell connections (synapses) and was considered by many to be one of the greatest neuroscientists of the twentieth century, was perhaps the most distinguished scientist who argued in favor of such a separation between mind, consciousness and the brain. He argued that the unity of conscious experience was provided by the mind and not by the machinery of the brain. His view was that the mind itself played an active role in selecting and integrating brain cell activity and moulded it into a unified whole. He considered it a mistake to think that the brain did everything and that conscious experiences were simply a reflection of brain activities, which he described as a common philosophical view:

'If that were so, our conscious selves would be no more than passive spectators of the performances carried out by the neuronal machinery of the brain. Our beliefs that we can really make decisions and that we have some control over our actions would be nothing but illusions.'

He further argued that there was 'a combination of two things or entities: our brains on the one hand and our conscious selves on the other'. He thought of the brain as an 'instrument that provides the conscious self or person with the lines of communication from and to the external world, and it does this by receiving information through the immense sensory system of the millions of nerve fibres that fire impulses to the brain, where it is processed into coded patterns of information that we read out from moment to moment in deriving all our experiences-our perceptions, thoughts ideas and memories'.

According to Eccles,

'We as experiencing persons do not slavishly accept all that is provided for us by our instrument, the neuronal machine of our sensory system and the brain, we select from all that is given according to interest and attention and we modify the actions of the brain, through "the self" for example, by initiating some willed movement.'

Eccles' theory has been well described in his book The Self and Its Brain. However, he acknowledged that he was still unable to explain how the mind carried out these activities and how it interacted with a separate brain.

Inspired through the work of his father, the late Ostad Elahi a distinguished philosopher, jurist, and theologian - Bahram Elahi, a well respected professor of surgery and anatomy with a distinguished academic and clinical career has also studied the question of the 'self' for over 40 years. During his work he has applied the same rigor of his scientific background to this subject and concluded that although the mind and the brain are separate - unlike some of the traditional 'dualists' views, consciousness or the self is not immaterial. Rather, it is composed of a very subtle type of matter that, although still undiscovered, is similar in concept to electromagnetic waves, which are capable of carrying sound and pictures and are governed by precise laws, axioms and theorems.

Therefore, in Elahi's view, everything to do with this entity should be regarded as a separate undiscovered scientific discipline and studied in the same objective manner as other scientific disciplines. He argues that as science is a systematic and experimental method of obtaining knowledge of a given domain of reality, then 'consciousness' or the 'self' can and should also be studied with the same objectivity. Each scientific discipline such as chemistry, biology and physics has its own laws, theorems and axioms, and in the same manner the science of 'the self' or the 'soul' should also be studied in the context of its own laws, theorems and axioms. In his view, consciousness is also a scientific entity and a type of 'matter', however it is a substance that is too subtle to be measured using the scientific tools available today. Therefore in his view the brain is an instrument that relays information to and from both the internal and external world, but 'consciousness' or 'the self' is a separate subtle scientific entity that interacts directly with it.