Location of Consciousness

[Foreigner]

This will be the official thread for discussions about whether or not consciousness really is just in the brain.

There is the view that consciousness must only be part of the brain, as evidenced by the fact that when the brain is damaged or altered in any way, a person's consciousness changes. There are many neuroscience experiments whose results strongly imply that we are no more than the sum of our biology, and when the body is gone so are we.

Others who say that out of body experiences, astral travel, and psychic powers are possible will contend that there must at least be some component of consciousness that is not intrinsic to the brain, and that aspects of consciousness are capable of experiencing externalities.

Another view will argue that consciousness and the soul are strictly non-physical and are just in this body for the human experience, before moving on. One analogy here could be that of a radio receiving signals. If the radio is damaged the signals are still broadcasting, but the interface is just damaged so it cannot be received; thus the brain is merely part of the physical aspect of the interface, but other levels of consciousness beyond the brain still exist simultaneously. i.e. we are non-material beings having a material experience.

What say you?

 

[rickolasnice]

You know what I say

There is no evidence to suggest that there is anything more to consciousness than the brain.. Anecdotal evidence isn't considered evidence for the simple fact it is REALLY unreliable.

If astral projection, psychic powers etc exist then they are not (despite what people claim) outside the reach of science.

People who are paid to talk to the dead or give you a psychic readings are all charlatans that use trickery.. once you know what to look for it is easy to spot. Things like cold reading, researching people, listening to peoples conversations with microphones in the lobby, barnum statements, waiting for the person to give them information before acting as if that's what they were going to say / what the spirits were telling them, etc etc.

Outside of people using it for trickery.. People at multiple times in their lives will have thoughts or dreams that seemingly come true.. This is down partly to coincidence and partly due to tricks of the mind.. Remembering details of a dream or thought differently to what they actually were once the future event happens, a deja vu type affect whereby an event will happen and you will think that you had previously dreamt / thought this, etc and of course, coincidence. Think how many thoughts and dreams you have throughout your life.. you have so many that it becomes probable that the improbable and even extremely improbable will happen.

Interesting TED talk on the topic:

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_searle_our_shared_condition_consciousness.html

 

[Psyduck]

Adding another question: How is this question "made possible" in the first place?

The LOGOS (principle of identity and difference) is that which "produces" difference/duality and unites it at the same time. It's through the LOGOS (=something structurally/logically/ontologically prior to consciousness and body) that we can experience the body-mind "problem" in the first place.

It is more interesting to question the primordial E-vent of separation/unification instead of post-reflection on already two opposites terms. The LOGOS is the "mediator" of all kind of duality. I always use a metaphor for this: consider a piece of paper: there is a "back-side" and "front-side," but what is the "middle-side" (so to speak), i.e. that which separates the two sides, yet keeps them together as a unity? In reality there is no duality, but a triad. The "middle" term of this triad is almost never part of discussion, because it is the most obscure. Discussions which only take into account the two outer poles of the duality, in my opinion, result in endless/fruitless discussions.

Also, I think the title is not good: "location" is the language one uses to locate stuff in space/time, which "consciousness" is by definition not part of. To try to point to some kind of "location" will be a flawed attempt from the start.

 

[Foreigner]

^ If you can think of a better title please let me know.

 

[Spoo]

This is actually a great, concrete topic. I cant speak for others but I imagine that the psychological structure in which we seek our understanding has more of pertinence to what is actually the truth of the location of our consciousness. For me, I find that these days many scientific theories and understandings make philosophy moot, or at least an undesirable and ancient methodology that we come to understand our existence.

Science has adequate means to at least explain some phenomena of consciousness. Thats not a philosophical detail, but I respect your topic to make an inquiry about the levity of its subject. I think its a valid quandary for someone to ask themselves of another dimensional plane that exists entirely separate of biology.


How could I not? Science is revealing to ourselves, that between string theory and quantum mechanics that elements of our being may exist in other-wise untouchable realms--restricted by the means a 2D drawing in a 3D world. In fact, its been discussed as philosophical conjecture by physicists alike. Even certain mathematicians have drawn a conclusion of eleven different dimensions and I certainly think it would be entirely plausible that a separate "Consciousness" aspect may have something to do with it.



A quantum physicist Amit Goswami has been merging a spiritual aspect to the science of consciousness as read in "The Self- Aware Universe."

Dr. Goswami has made lofty proposals of the idea of wave-functions collapsing and how it relates to our other-wise macroscopic world. Dr Goswami very distinctly states that consciousness is a separate but veritable form of the laws of physics as we see it. He can answer your question in a book as he believes it, but not what with it agree's with you or my criticism. He'll talk circles around anyone on this forum and make a solid case in spite of possibly being very wrong.

Fred Alan Wolf uses very practical means to reach a somewhat closured form of spiritual as it exists within the scientific world and how our brains interact with other-wise "Dead, uninhabitable space."

He doesnt need religion, as I dont. The science of our brain offers the beauty of our world ten-fold despite the chicken-shit attempts to negro the world under a monotheistic clause. I have my criticisms of these New-Age "Scientists" but then again Im not a scientist and what criticism there is is that they are a human being trapped in a world of a dictators mind they call "Myself."



I can read and learn what I can and take my understanding of science and read your topic and make a pretty good statement (I believe): Im a very down to Earth guy and my perspective about the location of our consciousness lies within science and the discoveries we've made within its field of neurobiology and physics. I dont have beliefs about the origination of my essence. I dont need to.


PS: Psyduck, His topic was succinct and made a little bit better from his other threads. I suppose in a philosophy forum there will be a tendency to get off-topic and discussing semantics, but you dont sound any more clever for introducing complications to an other-wise solid topic.

 

[ebola?]

And psyduck nails it. In my mind, this logos is something similar to the "experience" for Dewey (organism-environment interaction logically prior to the generation of subject and object therefrom), or Heidegger's dasein. You also find this beginning point in Marx's social ontology, and the phenomenologists anchor their analyses similarly.

ebola

 

[cashfl0w_d0nkey]

The way I see it, consciousness is quite apparent as the body's natural response to the environment. If you think about all of the individual actions that a person takes in life, they all when broken down can be traced to the body acting in an animalistic, survival-based way. It is as if the consciousness we experience just happens to draw the same conclusions about thriving that an organism without a mind would do on its own. Think about the growth of a tree as its individual genetics react to the environment around it, fulfilling its need for resources in an attempt to thrive and reproduce. The tree grows around obstacles to obtain nutrients and be exposed to sufficient light for growth and thriving. The same is true of animals-- the mind exists simply to circumvent obstacles in real-time.

 

[ebola?]

Also, I think the title is not good: "location" is the language one uses to locate stuff in space/time, which "consciousness" is by definition not part of. To try to point to some kind of "location" will be a flawed attempt from the start.

Another way to put things is that it is only through consciousness that things come to be located in the first place*, and without a means of perception of location of consciousness, it has no intelligible location. And yet I 'feel' like my consciousness is right between my eyes most of the time.

ebola
*well, I guess in the first place, 'LOGOS' presents the conditions of possibility for this to occur...but yeah, this also requires that consciousness and materiality as we know it share roots in these conditions and appear together.

 

[L2R]

[cough]chinese room[/cough]

consciousness is not in a place if not in everything that functions. whether it is aware or not is another matter. ebola, we've had this discussion a few years back. there is nothing special about the consciousness of the system which forms a full and health adult human, that doesn't exist in an animal, plant or machine, or any combination of these, both great and small.

 

[ebola?]

Right. I'm still wondering if there's a more parsimonious alternative. I think that the Hofstadter picture is pretty compelling but incomplete.

ebola

 

[-=SS=-]

I think a lot of our consciousness does arise from the brain, the vast majority in fact; we're animals, we evidently have programming, and despite our apparent complexity we are just an incredible collection of gestalts and reactive behavior. However I do think there is an etherical like component to it, what could be called 'mind', that interlocks with the synapses in our brain.. like the spark that jumps across the spark gap in an engine, in that plasma it is a wholly different state and organization of things, a gateway to a different dimension of things. Not sure how to word that, but you get the general idea. Whether this mind is individual, a species mind, global mind, a bit of each.. that's difficult to know.

I think the better question is to do with the location of awareness.

 

[Ksa]

The concept of soul, awareness or consciousness comes in my opinion from people's lack of understanding of what it means to become nothing once you die. In my views, once you are nothing, you can become anything because that's what happened when you were born: you were nothing and you became something. Could have been anything and anywhere. The concept of identity is so strong in humans that it is almost impossible for them to picture the world without themselves. They can perfectly picture the world without someone else, like their mother in-law lol, but not without themselves because that's their only point of view.

It's useless to bother too much about it. Before you were born, you weren't in control, you didn't order your birth, but the Universe did a fine job so far did it not? So why want to control things now? Leave it up to the Universe and the Universe will give you a place like it did in this life. This reality, it was always here. It has no beginning and it has no end. Just enjoy it.

I made an image to illustrate this:

What I'm saying is, not only you will live again once you die, but you cannot physically be in any other way than alive. Else you wouldn't "be" right?

What's so special of the concept of nothing is that it's not time and space dependent. In our every day life, we live in a 3-dimensional world and are bound by time so a concept that is independent of time and space is so abstract that the human mind cannot come to terms with it. Questions like

"how long will I stay dead until I can live again?"

or

"where will I go once I die?"

Are the best example of how the human mind cannot comprehend the concept of death, and nothingness. They want death to be measurable in time and space, like "going to heaven" because heaven is a 3-dimensional place just like your town or your apartment, or "waiting until the day of judgement" to describe that dead people can also be bound by time, just like we are bound by time in our everyday life. There is no such thing. There is no place where you go and a period of time required, once you die you're completely off the chart of time and space.

 

[-=SS=-]

The concept of soul, awareness or consciousness comes in my opinion from people's lack of understanding of what it means to become nothing once you die.

Well yes, and no. When you die your personality and personalized thinking becomes nothing, your brain rots, but the part of you that was watching the whole time remains. And that part is awareness. There's enough descriptions/literature from people who've done the whole trip (enlightenment) to get a grasp of what occurs/what is. Obviously it's not proven until you do it yourself, which is the point.

Consciousness is a bad word to use because people have a different definition of it, and it is also not the same as awareness. Awareness relates to the conscious process, but it is not consciousness itself.

 

[Ksa]

Well yes, and no. When you die your personality and personalized thinking becomes nothing, your brain rots, but the part of you that was watching the whole time remains. And that part is awareness. There's enough descriptions/literature from people who've done the whole trip (enlightenment) to get a grasp of what occurs/what is. Obviously it's not proven until you do it yourself, which is the point.

Consciousness is a bad word to use because people have a different definition of it, and it is also not the same as awareness. Awareness relates to the conscious process, but it is not consciousness itself.

They say that dopamine re-uptake inhibitors increase awareness. If awareness has nothing to do with the brain, how come it can be increased with that class of drugs?

 

[-=SS=-]

They say that dopamine re-uptake inhibitors increase awareness. If awareness has nothing to do with the brain, how come it can be increased with that class of drugs?

How are they (and who are they anyway) certain they can quantify awareness so it can be measured.. sounds like rubbish to me. Something might increase/decrease your perceptive ability or your ability to manage more information in that moment, but I can't see how awareness itself can be affected through chemical means.

 

[Ksa]

^ You see, you have trouble letting go. If your awareness is eternal, how would you justify a number of newly born living creatures in this universe that is superior to the number of creatures dying? If what you say is true, unless 10 persons die, 10 others cannot be born because they would have no awareness right? Unless their awareness is created from scratch at birth, and is erased with a scratch at death, there could never be more births then deaths, which, we obviously know it's wrong. We know there can be more deaths than births and vice-versa, anything is possible in existence.

If you have the means, and tomorrow, you want to clone 6 billion people, imagine, you having to wait for 6 billion people to die so that 6 other billion can be born. You see the non-sense? If you have the means, you can give birth to 6 billion people tomorrow, there's no problem, you can do it today also. Why? Because awareness is created on birth and it ends on death. Very simple, you're just not ready yet to accept it.

To further prove the awareness concept wrong: Imagine you build a space-ship and you travel outside the galaxy. You then go in hyper-sleep for a few billion years until all galaxies have accelerated away from you and when you wake up and look out the window, all the stars are gone. You then run out of life support and die. But your awareness remains according to you. Where will it go? There is nothing left to go to. The only way to escape that condition is if you exit time-space completely, so that the position in space and time where you are no longer defines you and binds you. It's the only way out from a place like that.

When I give you that example, all of a sudden you become scared. You no longer want to hold onto your awareness in those conditions right? I mean, you do right now because you want to stay on Earth, warm and nice....what if you're out there? Would you want to float out there forever?

How are they (and who are they anyway) certain they can quantify awareness so it can be measured.. sounds like rubbish to me. Something might increase/decrease your perceptive ability or your ability to manage more information in that moment, but I can't see how awareness itself can be affected through chemical means.

If you have more interest towards an activity, and then you come argue, interest is not measurable, it's not quantifiable so how can you increase it? Interest and awareness are human behaviors affected by drugs. Simple, you can increase/decrease both, why are you complicating it? A person dreaming is less aware then a person driving.

 

[-=SS=-]

Judging by your wall of text, I'd say you're the one having trouble letting go..

 

[Ksa]

Judging by your wall of text, I'd say you're the one having trouble letting go..

You're asking hard questions. Hard questions can't be answered shortly or you'll just ask more questions, which is a waste of my time, I prefer answering all your questions in one post then going at it all day. You probably never read past the first sentence, in that case, your loss.

Glad to win the argument, thank you sir!

 

[rickolasnice]

Judging by your wall of text, I'd say you're the one having trouble letting go..

His "wall of text" makes some good points.

 

[L2R]

Right. I'm still wondering if there's a more parsimonious alternative. I think that the Hofstadter picture is pretty compelling but incomplete.

ebola

searle's chinese room doesn't answer whether a computer can think, but if you recall our conversation about it, it may redefine what is commonly thought of as consciousness.

another analogy pointing in the right direction is the two people needing directions to a certain destination, one perfectly healthy and one with a memory disability. the former uses his memory whereas the latter uses notes. there is no difference in their minds when you factor the notes as a form like a functional prosthetic memory.