CONSCIOUSNESS 223 



brates that followed them, he has come to add conscious 

 purposes and plans to his devices for minimizing his dis- 

 quietudes. And thus he has come to say, 1 am ... I 

 feel ... I know,' and to ask himself: 



'How is the MEness, this consciousness that peers 

 through a window past a hedge of Rosa rugosa and a 

 lawn bounded by a stone wall, to the blue waters of 

 Frenchman Bay and a clouded sky, related to the atoms 

 and molecules that comprise my brain, and specifically 

 to those areas in my cerebral cortex where I do most of 

 my thinking?' 



It scarcely suffices to say that a capacity for conscious- 

 ness is inherent in some primordial form in every atom 

 and molecule, because, of a total of 92 elements in the 

 periodic table (not all of which have been isolated) — 

 and not including ten transuranyl elements (neptunium, 

 plutonium, americiirai, curium, californium, berkeliimi, 

 einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, and one tentatively 

 named nobehum) which have been artificially knocked 

 together in a cyclotron— probably not more than 12 enter 

 into the composition of my brain: carbon, hydrogen, 

 oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, sodium, potassium, 

 calcium, chlorine, iron, and magnesium. Nor does it help 

 to equate mind' and 'matter' at the level of the electron 

 —as, in eflFect, A. N. Whitehead does; why choose the 

 electron, when there are at least 30 other 'fundamental 

 particles' to choose from? 



Moreover, it is clear that my consciousness resides not 

 in any particular atoms because the atoms that are part 

 of me today, tomorrow will be gone from me to be re- 

 placed by others— there is scarcely one that is 'mine' for 

 more than a few weeks at most— but rather in their 

 unique and transient patterns of activity. 



The bald facts are that, for matter to know itself in 

 ME, ten billion neurons in my brain, and many, many 

 times that nimiber of functional connections, are re- 

 quired to give me the past, the present, and the all too 

 inaccurately divined future that contrive this moment. 



