School of Distance Education
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English Literature in the 21 st century 53 Levine in an influential paper in 1983 drew attention to the failure of purely material processes to explain this phenomenon. Philosophers like David Chalmer, physicist James Trefil were dissatisfied with materialistic theories. Trefil concedes that “no matter how my brain works, no matter how much interplay there is between my brain and my body, one single fact remains . . . I am aware of a self that looks out at the world from somewhere inside my skull . .” But neuroscientists and AI researchers reject this line of argument. Distinguished neuroscientist V S Ramachandran Says that “the barrier between mind and matter is only apparent and arises as a result of language”. Daniel Dennett is of the opinion that consciousness is an illusion unhappy phenomenon which requires greater brainpower and it has a strong evolutionary need for survival. Lodge then moves to the relationship between literature and the perception of human consciousness. When one say nothing has been written about consciousness he ignores the whole corpus of literature as literature is the record of human consciousness, The richest and the most comprehensive. The novel is arguably and individual's most successful effort to describe the human experience through space and time. Noam Chomsky has stated that we learn more about human behavior and personality from novels than scientific psychology. We learn about human behavior how a person would react to a certain situation or how one would perform through fiction. Works of literature focus on strict personal experience. For example Jane School of Distance Education English Literature in the 21 st century 54 Austen's Emma could not be written by anybody else will not be written by anybody else. The Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman has some interesting things to say on this topic : “We are at the beginning of the neuro scientific revolution. At the end we should knowhow the mind works, what governs our nature, and how we know the world “He makes an interesting distinction between science and history. : “Science has emerged within history, and it attempts to describe . . . the boundaries of the world—its constraints and its physical laws. But these laws . . . do not and cannot exhaust experience or replace history or the events that occur in the actual courses of individual lives. Events are denser than any possible scientific description.” The recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essentially narrative character. Antonio Demasio Has stated that human consciousness is self consciousness be not only have experiences but we are aware of having them. He draws attention to the paradox stated by William James that our self in the stream of consciousness changes continuously as it move forward in time. As Daniel Dennett puts it .”As spiders make webs and beavers build dams, so we tell stories”. Lodge In this essay alludes to CP snow's 1959 “The two cultures and the scientific revolution” He points that Britain had the power to revolutionize science for greater good but it was impeded by ignorance of politicians. Literature constitutes a kind of knowledge about consciousness which is complementary to scientific knowledge. The philosopher Nicholas |