When I was in middle school, we learned about the solar system with a toy model. In the center of the model was a large orange ball (the sun), and surrounding it were other plastic balls, representing the planets. Needles attached Saturn and Uranus to their rings, which were made from frisbee parts. Our teacher mentioned that, through such models, scientists attempt to understand and predict the interactions among the elements of a complex system, one that is normally difficult to study at its actual (in this case gigantic) scale. For example, though we do not usually see the planets turning around the sun, the model allowed us to quickly appreciate certain facts that we would not have learned otherwise: Mercury sometimes blocks the sunlight from hitting other planets. The teacher then mentioned that all the physical forces acting upon the actual solar system were also acting upon our humble classroom model. I thought, "Oh, so then we have everything we need to predict and understand the solar system."
But then I asked our teacher, "If that's true, how come our plastic sun is not strongly attracting the plastic balls (planets), as occurs in our actual solar system?" I later learned that this is because, at this small scale, our model failed to instantiate strong enough gravitational fields, the kind that are induced by large masses such as planets and suns. In this way, in the physical world there are phenomena that arise at some scales of existence but not others. Accordingly, Einstein noted that certain bizarre phenomena that are not observable in everyday experience occur only at extremely fast speeds (those approaching the speed of light) but not at other speeds (the speeds observed in the objects comprising our everyday environments).
One of the greatest puzzles in the study of the mind-brain is, How does
neural tissue (or anything in the known universe, for that matter) give rise to any kind of conscious experience? The problem is a deep one, perhaps the deepest in science, because it's not only that we do not know how basic conscious experience (
aka 'sentience' or 'awareness') emerges from neurons and brain, but that we don't have a clue regarding how
anything could give rise to such a phenomenon. In other words, even if a neuroscientist were provided with all the materials and dimensions (all eleven of them) of the known universe, he or she would still be unable to have an inkling regarding how set about having basic consciousness arise from something physical.
After studying this issue for quite some time, I am beginning to appreciate that, such as our small-scale classroom model of the solar system could not instantiate the critical phenomenon (strong gravitational fields) that glues our solar system together, our human experience occurs at a scale far different from that in which consciousness arises (fast neurons interacting with each other). In other words, there is nothing that we can perceive in everyday life that works as fast (and in such an interactive manner) as the functional units of our brain. Regarding speed, our conscious experience is far slower than that which gives rise to it. Something may be arising from the super fast speeds of neurons and their networks that cannot happen at the slower speed of our everyday existence, the only environment we evolved to understand. What we observe and understand, such as the 'cause and effect' relationships among billiard balls striking each other, also occurs at a slower scale than the workings of neurons. It's important to appreciate that gravity seemed to be a conceptual mystery (dubbed 'action at a distance') until Einstein proved that our assumptions about it were wrong: Space is not 'empty' but actually has a fabric that is warped by mass, giving rise to the phenomenon we identify as gravity. Our assumptions about how things work (and cannot work) at the 'human scale' of existence may not be applicable to smaller, faster scales. Thus, the deepest mysteries of the mind-brain may be a matter of scale.
