Cracking consciousness: how do our minds really work?

With scientists mapping our neurons in ever greater detail, and companies like Google claiming they’re close to creating human-level artificial intelligence, the gap between brain and machine seems to be shrinking — throwing the question of consciousness, one of the great philosophical mysteries, back into the heart of scientific debate. Will the human mind — that ineffable tangle of private, first-person experiences — soon be shown to have a purely physical explanation? The neuroscientist Steven Novella certainly thinks so: ‘The evidence for the brain as the sole cause of the mind is, in my opinion, overwhelming.’ 

Elon Musk agrees: ‘Consciousness is a physical phenomenon, in my view’. Google’s Ray Kurzweil puts it even more bluntly: ‘A person is a mind file. A person is a software program.’

If these guys are correct, the ramifications are huge. Not only would it resolve, in a snap, a conundrum that’s troubled mankind for millennia — it would also pave the way for an entirely new episode in human history: minds uploaded to computers and all.