naturebraine

Ugo Naturebraine is a science graduate and freelance philosopher who lives in the UK. He gained an honours degree in theoretical physics in the 1990s, and has been studying the mind and the difficulties of explaining subjective experience ever since. His poems are all intended to express various aspects of the mystery of consciousness from the perspective of a rational scientist who wants to hold the most scientifically-defensible worldview. They deal with the mysterious image-forming nature of colours, the astonishing existence of the sounds we hear, the bizarre misfortune that we have evolved to experience intense pain when damaged, and the equally weird fact that our minds are rewarded with pleasant sensations whenever our body does what’s good for its genes. Even the poems that are not explicitly about the mind have a subtle relevance to that subject. They address common misunderstandings about Nature that resemble the misunderstandings about consciousness that this author blames for our apparent lack of scientific progress in accounting for this mysterious phenomenon. In some of his longer rhymes, he even attempts to strip away these popular misunderstandings and reveal the explanation for consciousness to which modern science most strongly points. He then examines what that explanation of consciousness would imply about the universe we inhabit.