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 Like Melissa, the issue of consciousness was one that seemed to pervade most of the topics we discussed. The question of consciousness was present in addressing some of the most abstract questions (e.g., whether one can know the emotional state of another and make judgments about the correctness of their self-reports), some of the most mechanistic questions (e.g., whether consciousness must be involved in relocating function from one set of circuits to another), and some of the most technological (e.g., whether fMRI can lend insight into mental states). These three examples just scratch the surface of a growing body of research that is increasingly pressured to deal with the notion of consciousness; some of the "hardest" sciences are beginning to require an articulation of the floofiest concepts in order to even approach usefulness. This tension is also apparent in another topic that stuck out to me: the irreducibility of neuroscience. I had not previously considered how disastrous the consequences might be if neuroscience turned out to be fundamentally irreducible. Moreover, I had not realized how true this probably is. Neuroscience fundamentally assumes that the trends, associations, and mechanisms that it discovers generalize, that what it finds is not confined to a single experiment. Thus, implicit in the very endeavor is the identification and prediction of patterns, of similarities between disparate entities. But it seems, based on our discussion of religion and shared subjectivity, that these patterns are inherently fraught; there will always exist some diversity among these trends. This illuminated for me a fundamental tension in neuroscience between its hope of categorizing/explaining all things and its inability to understand each instance. Rather, it turns out that maybe neuroscience is a lot like laws of nature (e.g., gravity): we observe general trends, but have no necessary reason to believe that they could not be broken, or why they are so.

These thoughts informed my questions that should be addressed in the future:

1. Can consciousness be given an appropriate neural explanation? We think of the study of the brain as a study of the mind, but is this misled? Might it turn out that the mind contains socially-contingent or floofy features which cannot even in principle be reduced? If so, what will the usefulness of neuroscience turn out to be?

2. Can neuroscience account for the diversity in trends? Will it be able to formulate "laws" that can eventually explain even the most disparate circumstances? Or will it eventually give up? And if so, how will this affect our notions of religion, of consciousness, or of self?

3. And now for something completely different: I'll be interested in learning how neuroscience develops the concept of free will. Some of the most accomplished neuroscientists, who know best how every behavioral nuance can be explained by neurons, simply assume that free will must exist. But what does it mean if every action, every thought is the necessary result of preceding causal factors? Why stop at the insanity defense? How do we reconstruct free will out of the reductionist rubble of neuroscience?