Contributions of Dr. Sirajul Husain in the Greatest Unsolved Problems in Cognitive Science

Abstract

The most significant contribution of Dr. Sirajul Husain is a theory of consciousness that has offered solutions to the three major unsolved problems in Cognitive Science: How a conscious experience arises in a physical brain, how it acquires meaning, and how meaning is represented in the brain. His research marks a major paradigm shift by his introduction of a non-reductionist approach to the phenomenon of consciousness as the foundation of cognition. His insightful prediction of a novel society of non-coding genes as a non-reductive source for emergence of consciousness, (International Conference on “Toward a Science of Consciousness”, University of Arizona, 2004) was based on his conviction that consciousness cannot be reduced to brain physiology, and that it emerges as a field, with neurobiology essentially acting as a neurocatalyst. His prediction was duly fulfilled by a monumental discovery of a set of forty nine non-coding genes, (University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006), in particular, RNA gene (HAR1F), which was found to be responsible for development of human cerebral cortex, the centre of cognitive process. These favourable circumstances led Dr. Husain to develop a unified cognitive field theory of consciousness, which mathematically describes the cognitive kinematics of how meaning arrives in a conscious experience and how it is represented, essentially independent of a language. In order to account for semantic relativistic effect that arises when conscious experiences are expressed using a natural languages, Dr. Husain propounded a non-Euclidean, curved, four-dimensional space, termed sense-sound continuum, comprising of auditory, visual, somatosensory, and sound, for conserving semantic invariance of a conscious experience. Dr. Husain’s interdisciplinary research in consciousness and cognitive science has a far reaching impact on several disciplines, from reconciliation of theory of relativity and quantum mechanics to a theory of everything, from psychiatry to mind-body medicine, and to theology. However, by far the most significant aspect of his research is toward a theory of human mind, the most efficient, self-regulating system in nature that is known to function at negative entropy. One can say we are entering an Era of the Mind, vis-a-vis the Decade of the Brain, of the nineties. NeuroQuantology | June 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 2 | Page 305-313