The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
The key question is what philosophers would call ‘qualia’ – the redness of red. What explains the redness of red? Or in other words, what explains the fact that you are aware of things? It’s not easy to define these terms; in fact it’s better not to. But you all know- everybody knows roughly what they mean to be conscious because they know when they’re in a dream- deep, dreamless sleep, they’re not conscious; or when they’re under an anaesthetic, they’re not conscious. They- they actually know that there are these- they can be in such states where they’re not conscious, and the real question is what’s the difference in the brain when you’re under an anaesthetic, a deep anaesthetic for example on the one hand, and when you’re awake? Because it isn’t true the brain just packs up. All sorts of things go on and if you had your eyes taped open and signals sent into your eyes, then part of your brain would react just as it would if you were awake. But there must be differences and we don’t know what those differences are. And it turns out, not many people in the past have been very interested in finding out because they found so- so many interesting things working on anaesthetised animals that for a long time they didn’t even work on alert animals. Now they work on alert animals, but they’re not necessarily trying to find the difference between the anaesthetised ones and the alert ones. And that’s one of the problems which certain people say will never be explained by science; it will be explained- it's something outside science is required to explain that. The only way we can refute that would be to explain it by science and produce such a- a convincing explanation backed up by so much experimental data that we could say the other hypothesis, that there has to be something extra, is not needed. That’s of course the furthest we could go. We’re a long way off that yet. How long, I wouldn’t like to say.
Title: Qualia: the redness of red
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
1 minute, 55 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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