Where Is My Mind? - Issue 79: Catalysts

In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies and a beaming, blue-green sea. He had already won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, revealing the basis of life to be a purely physical, not a mystical, process. He hoped to do the same thing for consciousness. If matter was strange enough to explain a creature's life code, he thought, maybe it's strange enough to explain a creature's mind, too. For something that everybody walks around with everyday, consciousness wouldn't seem to be as immense a puzzle as the origin of the universe.