Decoding consciousness

As our knowledge of consciousness and its operation improves, the description of our understanding of consciousness will require both metaphysics and neuro-cognitive sciences. The methods to understand consciousness have to be both experiential and experimental given the nature of the subject of our inquiry. Decoding the process of perception and its processing in the brain could probably be an area where experimental methods will provide encouraging results to improve our knowledge of consciousness. However given the inevitably personal and subjective nature of consciousness any understanding in this area has to be experientially validated because my consciousness is not available to others to detect, test or experiment with. Scientific experiments involve observation, hypothesis, experimental methodology, repeating the experiment and predicting the result. It can be done to understand brain chemistry and prescribing medicine to alter or induce a particular behavior by adding or subtracting chemical dosage to brain cells. Beyond that it will be difficult for science given its methods to analyze consciousness because it may not be possible to observe and repeat such experiments in many cases. It seems clear that as we move into the future of scientific discoveries, we should be able to understand better some aspects of consciousness but whether our knowledge about this subject can ever be complete is a debatable issue. After all it's an attempt by consciousness to understand itself. There might be an inherent limitation for a system to describe itself only using itself. Probably consciousness is forever going to be an elusive object for our mental faculties. (Courtesy:Sneha Sheth)

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