Understanding consciousness

Abstract

In Hanif Kureishi's short novel The Body , Adam is a playwright in his sixties who looks back on his life with a fair amount of regret (Kureishi, 2002). Ralph, an admirer of Adam's work, introduces him to an experiment that could offer a new lease of life. With the help of a confident doctor from a dubious but apparently sophisticated clinic, Adam is given the chance to have his mind transferred into the corpse of an unknown man. He simply goes shopping for a new body off the rack, undergoes a mysterious operation at a sterile facility and finds himself in a fresh and younger body that he will inhabit for a six‐month trial period. Adam enjoys the immediate consequences of his younger appearance, travels all over Europe, takes pleasure in various adventures and indulges in mindless sexual encounters. For some time, he feels as if he is finally living the life he never had. But Adam soon realizes that changing his body did not give him the privilege of escaping his mind. > It would be a mistake to claim that consciousness is exclusively an observable behaviour… The reader does not know whether Adam merely had his brain transplanted into the new body or whether his whole ‘self’ was somehow wired onto the young man's brain, but the story highlights the age‐old question of what is the repository for subjective consciousness and phenomenal experience. Kureishi's novel evokes the old dualism between flesh and spirit, body and mind, which runs deep through Western culture. But now that neuroscience is able to explain human nature and the mind in increasing detail, this dualism may soon be—or indeed, should be—dead and buried. Adam's story, although fictional and futuristic, prompts ethical considerations of progress in neuroscience research and offers us the chance to …