If I were to be eaten by a shark, I’m pretty sure the worst part would be not the pain or the mutilation or the actual dying and so forth, but rather the thought balloon over my head with the words, “I’m being eaten by a (expletive) shark!”

Whereas a fish doesn’t have this problem. A fish has no thought balloon, or just a teensy little one, with a monosyllabic fish-word like “Urp!” A fish probably suffers, but it doesn’t have the additional suffering that comes from knowing that it’s suffering, and from regretting that it went swimming instead of watching the golf tournament, and from hearing, as we all do whenever we’re devoured by sharks, the theme music from “Jaws”. You know: that tuba.

All of which is a deft way of introducing our subject today: The Mystery of Consciousness. It’s one of the biggest unknowns, right up there with the origin of life. But it’s under a multi-pronged assault by scientists.

The human brain is a hunk of meat that weighs about three pounds. It contains about 30 billion cells, called neurons. The networking of these cells involves 100 trillion meeting points, or synapses. This is the most complex object in the known universe (though if we explore the stars we may eventually find organisms with brains that make ours seem as impressive as Twinkies).

Human brains can do things that no computer can match. Beyond the basics of perception and motor skills, the human brain has a premium feature: consciousness. You could also call it sentience, or self-awareness, or just the thing that makes it such a drag to be devoured by a mindless oceanic carnivore.

Earlier this year, Jim Olds, director of George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute, gathered a bunch of big thinkers from his university for a two-day conference on the mind. He and his allies want the US government to invest $4 billion in an initiative that would be called the “Decade of the Mind”.

This would be a follow-up to a 1990s programme called the “Decade of the Brain”, which brought increased attention to neuroscience. The new initiative would be an attempt to take science into a realm previously explored only by philosophers, theologians and mountaintop yogis.

There’s reason to be optimistic. Look at what has happened in recent years with the development of brain scans, such as MRIs, that let us observe the brain at work in real time.

That said, the mind isn’t something that pops up on a computer screen. People have been poking around the brain in search of the mind for many centuries, and no one is even sure what neurological structures are the most critical to generating consciousness.

“Dualism” solves the location problem by defining it away: The mind is perceived as separate from the body, something that can’t be reduced to machinery. It’s unreachable by the tools of the laboratory. Dualism flatters us, for it suggests that our minds, our selves, are not merely the result of rambunctious chemistry, and we are thus free to talk about souls and spirits and essences that are unfettered by the physical body.

The brain operates day and night and performs myriad functions of which we have no direct awareness. Even our “conscious” brain is actually many different operating systems.

Cracking the code of the mind may be ultimately impossible. My guess is that a century from now, consciousness will still make the list of Biggest Mysteries and scientists and philosophers will still be arguing about the what, where and how of it all.

But we should still take a whack at it. Ten years and $4 billion: That’s a reasonable cost. The evolution of the human mind is arguably the most important biological event in the history of our planet since the origin of life itself.

Washington Post