ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts some archaeological excavations into the ruins and tombs of bygone ages; the First Golden Age, the subsequent Dark Ages, and finally the return of consciousness into the realm of psychological science. From the very beginning, the relationship between science and consciousness has been deeply ambivalent. Consciousness became the "ghost in the machine": the spirit captured in the grand but unfeeling universal mechanism; the lonely immaterial soul inside the all-embracing physical machine. The relation between physical energy as a stimulus and the resulting subjective conscious experience follows the mathematical laws discovered by Gustav Theodor Fechner. He shows that Descartes and Kant were simply wrong in claiming that an empirical consciousness science is impossible. Gestalt psychologists also developed a theory of the relationship between consciousness and the brain. It is based on the principle of psychophysical isomorphism. Gestalt psychology, like William James, criticized Structuralism for its atomistic view of consciousness and argued for a holistic conception.
