Comment by Heather Spoonheim on February 6, 2011 at 12:00am

I like to think of current consciousness science as mirroring physics.  I feel we are in a Newtonian phase that will be followed by a special relativity phase, and ultimately a quantum phase, with the uncertainty increasing proportionally to our knowledge base.  If this allegory holds, it seems to me that at some point we might actually begin to realize that the driving force behind consciousness separates from the concrete and instinctual realm of experience, input, and memory.  It might even be that the nature of something as heuristic as curiousity might be correlated to some quantum field, such as gravity has been speculated to be the result of the higgs field/boson.  In the end, we might develop such a powerful philosophical microscope as to peer into the lens and realize that we are looking back at ourselves.  A fairytale, I know, and perhaps not much more useful than religion - but as long as we don't start developing dogma in anticipation of this sort of eureka, isn't it at least a compelling thought experiment?

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