In which field (neuroscience, AI, etc.) will consciousness be understood first? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

The understanding of consciousness will emerge first in neuroscience without a doubt, but with contributions from interrelated fields (in boldface below).

The brain is the only known system that exhibits consciousness today, so this is the only system on which the mechanics of consciousness can be deduced. Furthermore, no one will believe that consciousness has been understood until human consciousness can be explained in total and thorough detail.

That said, understanding consciousness, just like understanding the mechanisms of intelligence, is very much an interdisciplinary project. As the understanding of the brain gets better, and also as the understanding of machine intelligence gets better, biology and technology are converging with computational neuroscience on the biology side, and statistical machine learning on the technology side. These fields are increasingly using the same concepts, and the common language is turning out to be math and specifically statistics, probability, and systems thinking.

Psychology is still the link between neuroscience and anything that the general public can relate to, but psychology and neuroscience are increasingly converging as well, first with psychiatry in the 1970s, and more recently with cognitive neuroscience in the 1990s.

Within this interdisciplinary mix, two fields will be the catalysts: math (structured statistics and probability) will be the language that links everything together. And philosophy will be the eternal gadfly that keeps everyone honest, and challenges all theories at every step. But ultimately, philosophy advances by incorporating scientific discoveries into the philosophical frameworks and and then provides the ultimate conceptual explanation.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

* Neuroscience: If consciousness is hallucinated by the brain, who experiences that?

* Consciousness: Is our mind/consciousness similar to a computer program?

* Human Brain: Do nerve signals lose energy as they travel towards the brain?

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