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Consciousness

^^Very interesting post and will look forward to that more later thing you were talking about.

I have a puzzler for you though. Suppose a man is wounded in such a way that he becomes blind, deaf, mute, quadraplegic, unable to move in any way, but still able to be, at least medically speaking, awake, or at least, not asleep. They would be in no way aware of their outside world, but would still have brain activity. For that matter, when we dream, and our brains show activity, we are aware of the internal world within our dreams. We are by definition, not conscious, or unconscious, but we are still aware.
 
this is an awesome thread, but I don't have the energy to make a full-fledged post in it atm.

however I did just find this article, which verifies our accessing of stored knowledge is an emergent process dependent on many different energies of the brain. I've been suspicious our human "consciousness" exists in the same manner for a while; a sorta spontaneous resource management engine for the sum total of our perceptive input. Thoughts?
 
I have a puzzler for you though. Suppose a man is wounded in such a way that he becomes blind, deaf, mute, quadraplegic, unable to move in any way, but still able to be, at least medically speaking, awake, or at least, not asleep. They would be in no way aware of their outside world, but would still have brain activity.
Click to expand...

No puzzle - yes! What you describe is the state obtained with ketamine (total sensory shutdown). Do you think people in a K-hole are brain dead? (that actually begs a comic response, but I...must...resist... =D)
 
I actually typed a comic response but managed to backspace it into oblivion. Oooh the TRIUMPH!

I'm back to not reading this thread. Bye.
 
fastandbulbous said:
No puzzle - yes! What you describe is the state obtained with ketamine (total sensory shutdown). Do you think people in a K-hole are brain dead? (that actually begs a comic response, but I...must...resist... =D)
Click to expand...

Having used PCP and DXM for so long in my younger years, I'm most certainly familiar with this effect.. and yet, it never even occurred to me.. now, who's brain dead? :\
 
cognosis said:
How much of your awareness of dream content being presented to you is during the dream and how much of it is something you tell your_self about in retrospect?

IMO, consciousness|awareness is the same thing as lucidity. What is lucidity if not being aware? What is being aware if not being conscious? You aren't aware most of the time. People are dreaming, even when awake. We've become used to our lives we just tell ourselves stories about reality instead of really looking at it.
Click to expand...

I'm confused - you first say that consciousness is lucidity/awareness, but then go on to agree that people aren't "aware" most of the time. The latter I totally agree with, and I think it's fair to say that it's very popular position across most of cognitive philosophy.

So then are you saying by your definition, people are not conscious most of the time? I think then that any definition of consciousness has to include a major part of humanities brain time, and what you are describing is only a particular kind of being, that is part of the set of "different kinds of consciousness"
 
There's a lot of support for dream consciousness being conducted through completely separate neural pathways.

A theorist (on emotions mainly), Panskepp, claims that dream consciousness may be a form of early proto-consciousness that has now taken backseat to our more advanced neo-cortical consciousness. This would explain the gap between dream memories and long-term explicit memory systems.

This thread still is the best thread ever, I wish I had more time to contribute.
 
^^ I suppose that this would imply that, at least for my cat, life is but a dream after all. :D
 
A thought:

Perhaps there is only awareness, and it arranges itself in varying degrees of intensity. The dim world of a molecule has no senses, no nerves and no brain. But it is still a cohesive, consistent body of energy there. Then there are organisms, with 'rich inner lives', intense feelings, complex nervous systems and brains.

Mind and body are words we use to distinguish dualistically between two essential components of the same thing. The mind cannot exist without the brain; the brain cannot exist without the mind. Which is not to say that without the emotions and thoughts and identity we associate with what we are. It is to say: that without the deep subconscious self-regulating system that holds it in place, the physical matter that allows this form of experience to exist decomposes and consciousness can no longer emerge from it.

They are effectively interchangable. Without a body, there can be no mind. Without a mind, in no real sense can there be a body - an arrangement of matter for sure, but no more alive than a clay model. I believe this is what psood0nym was getting at in the quote at the start of this thread.

If you believe in an afterlife, I think you must also believe that the mind construes or enters some other kind of etheric body after the physical one dies. Because without the body there is no mind. I don't think anaesthesia or total destruction of the cerebral cortex proves that consciousness ceases with physical death. It may be that the fluctuating higher qualia of sapience and sentience merely dims for a while, whilst the mind-based system holding things together manifests in a different form, a spiritual body of sorts. I think it's possible. I also find it curious that discussions such as these tend to implicitly disqualify the afterlife; doubtless the majority of people interested in them are atheists like myself, but still, it is a curious point to consider.

I'm curious about DMT because I'd like to experience (to BE the experience of) a mind in a wholly different kind of body, with different senses, perceiving a world we humans are blind to while abstracted from the one I'm used to. Magic stuff. And the whole prospect behind my thought opens up so many amazing possibilities. This world might be just one tiny experience we have in an infinite expanse of awareness experiencing itself to higher and higher degrees.
 
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