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