The Existence of Consciousness

Abstract

Thank you very much both for your introduction and also for your participation in the discussion yesterday. It pointed to a number of questions which I should clarify and it also gave me an opportunity to voice my conviction on the questions discussed: my conviction that life and consciousness cannot be described in terms of the concepts of present-day physics. I hope that science will eventually develop concepts which give interesting and highly significant information not only about inanimate objects—as does present-day physics—but also about life and consciousness. Whether the so encompassing science will be called physics or will have another name, I do not know. Perhaps it will be called scisif. But that is not important. What is important is whether the three basic principles which physics obeys will be maintained. For this reason, I would like to discuss these principles, the discussion of the second one of which will contain again the demonstration that we are as yet far from a unification of physics and the life sciences.