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Guy Noir tries to get to the bottom of things. Noir is the fictional 1940’s style private eye on the American public radio program A Prairie Home Companion. Each episode begins with this set up:

A dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but on the twelfth floor of the Acme Building one man is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions — Guy Noir, Private Eye — (THEME UNDER)

Ya, there is this thing about life’s persistent questions. Noir can take his time looking for answers, but I like a quick simple explanation, or at least a better question.

One of the most persistent of life’s persistent questions is what is consciousness? Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran takes a 500 word stab at it in On My Mind in Seed magazine. Not surprisingly, Ramachandran comes up with the idea that the answer lies in figuring out what’s going on in the brain.

Not just any part of the brain: it’s the parts that helps us make meaning and nuance from the barrage of sensory information coming at us all the time. As these brain structures became part of humans, they let us package sensory goings on into more manageable pieces and start getting use out of symbols and language.

I like Ramachandran’s concise ideas on how to answer this persistent life’s question. But I like even better how he got there. He first knocks down the idea that understanding consciousness needs to solve the question of how qualia arise before tackling the sense of self. It’s two sides of the same coin, he says:

You cannot have “free floating” qualia without a self to experience them and to give them meaning.

Moshe Feldenkrais might have said the same kind of thing when referring to somatic experiences. Better to say “I am hurting in my knee” than “My knee is hurting.” The more helpful experience is of the whole, not the isolated parts.)

Ramachandran’s ideas come from a neurological perspective, of course. Guy Noir might answer differently.