Fear of death.

well i mean sure the brain forms new cells as it has experiences, so obviously the "shape" of the brain or whatever you want to call it (the particular macro-micro workings of which are completely obscure btw, else we would certainly have functioning a.i. by now) is related to experience

but i don't see how it follows then that experience is reducible to those cells?

Well that is sort of just accepted common sense, however baseless.

like i guess what i'm saying is that we still don't even really have evidence of "consciousness" that's deducible from biology. and we don't have anything in our biology that suggests to us the necessity of art or language. we don't have an organ that other animals don't, and in fact, there's really nothing about our organs that we could point at, and say, hey, if you were missing that gene or that cell or that organ, you wouldn't have art or language or whatever (much to the dismay of the intelligent design crowd)

so i'm wondering if we can't decisively point toward consciousness or language on a scientific, material level, the same way we can't decisively point toward time or soul, you guys ready to also deny your experience of consciousness, language or time?

like i guess what i'm getting at is if you really think *SCIENTISTS* (other than richard dawkins) spend a lot of their time telling other people their relationship to immanence is irrational and then producing heaps of *SCIENCE* to win the argument

like people keep saying infinity and eternity as if these are basic commonsense concepts well understood and characterized by science

for one thing, "consciousness" is not a _thing_. it is a series of parallel and overlapping processes--many of which are preconscious. if you begin to remove parts of a person's brain, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

this is a good one here, where a truth (that consciousness is a series of parallel and overlapping processes) becomes an excuse for a handy overlapping of ideas

by the same argument, removing their ears would change their memories of music?

if you begin to remove parts of a person's heart, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

you mean like oliver sacks though, right?

Well, the ancient Egyptians didn't think the brain was important at all in the journey to the afterlife, that's why they removed it (with a hook, through the nose).

incredibly, you could take a hook through the nose and out the top of the skull and still recognize faces, yet people w/ a tiny defect (less than 1%) at the bottom of brain can't recognize faces or ever learn to, they have to rely on recognizing noses, hair color and eye color

you could also die

BUT STILL

i wonder how it feels to be highly conscious of other people's noses and if that enhanced consciousness continues into the afterlife

by the same argument, removing their ears would change their memories of music?

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:04 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Parts of the brain was specified...

And I'm not saying eternity is a commonsense concept. What do you imagine it to be?

i feel like a lot of people on this thread could stand to read some contemporary neuroscience.

i think you are really placing more weight on contemporary neuroscience than it can bear.

'In 2004, eight neuroscientists felt it was too soon for a definition. They wrote an apology in "Human Brain Function":
'We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way.'

also tlg otm.

Would you say consciousness at least is a product of the brain, and that it cannot exist actively in a complete form somehow removed from the brain (as if it were a single entity) or with the brain non-functioning?

I would say consciousness as we know it is at least a product of some kind of complex material system, etc etc. But if you want to say that consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, and not somehow part of the intrisic nature of matter itself, then I'm not buying it. Maybe rocks really are conscious to some infinitesimal degree.

This has informed my thinking an awful lot recently (and yes that's my comment near the bottom)

http://guidetoreality.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quotes-on-key-mindbody-insight.html

xpost

If consciousness is constituted from a bunch of different overlapping processes then maybe it could stay intact if those processes were moved piecemeal into some other non-brain substance.

And even if it didn't stay fully intact - if you lost all of your memories or lost your sense of self - we might still want to say that the consciousness has, in some minimal sense, "survived."

Yeah, but the question of "will we be able to simulate the human consciousness in a machine, like simulating a snes on a modern PC?" is still a level closer to earth to the idea of the consciousness continuing sans all current input (and output (and hardware))

if you define consciousness as awareness, and accept that awareness is the modeling of another state, then you kind of do need at least an initial input, but once you have it, you could create a very simple system that could be said to be conscious.

is ilx conscious

it's pretty self-conscious, i've noticed.

and accept that awareness is the modeling of another state

I do not accept this.

what's an acceptable litmus test for awareness then?

A map is the modelling of a geographic state. Or software modelling a weather system if you want a dynamic example. Are either of those aware? We're talking apples and oranges here. How do I recognise it? God knows! My experience of aware systems is limited to one.

i'd argue those things are as aware as a human is on those subjects, and probably more reliable. the map, though, being static, is as aware as a dead human. but if you put a pushpin on it, it's resurrected.

the problem with defining "consciousness" is that its only real defining characteristic is self-awareness, and self-awareness is something that can only be apprehended subjectively, by the self-aware consciousness. of course, we can perceive secondhand evidence of consciousness in the behavior and communication of others, but our fundamental sense of it - what human consciousness is and does - remains inseparable from self-awareness.

i reject, however, the idea that because we cannot materially define or identify consciousness, it is therefore premature or otherwise unjustified to say that human consciousness is produced and sustained by - and in a sense resides in - the human brain. the human brain seems, among other things, to be a consciousness-generating mechanism. though we do not now exactly how the brain generates the self-aware awareness we call consciousness, we have sufficient evidence, i think, to say that it does in fact do this.

we can also say with some degree of certainty that the state of human consciousness is affected by the state of the human brain. consciousness does not seem to preexist the brain. as the brain develops, so does consciousness. activity within this or that part of the brain typically corresponds in a predictable fashion with this or that conscious state. when we damage the brain, we run a substantial risk of damaging (or at least affecting) consciousness. when we extinguish the brain, we seem to extinguish consciousness.

we do not need to be able to measure or even fully define consciousness to understand the relationship of mind to brain and to understand, too, what this implies about the durability of human consciousness.

paragraph 2: "though we do not know exactly how the brain generates the self-aware awareness..."

"self-awareness is something that can only be apprehended subjectively, by the self-aware consciousness."

i'm not sure, but i think techniques have existed for awhile now to capture how the brain models one's sense of self at least on a very rough level. I bet at some point 'self-awareness' will pass from a philosophical question to commonplace legally admissible evidence of guilt/innocence based on some kind of brain scan w/r/t say like intent to murder. You could show, for example, that you were actually "out of yourself" when chopping up someone.

the qualia of pain, i think, is way tricker to nail down than self-awareness, which seems easy peezy. is a lobster self-aware seems like a way easier question to answer than if it feels pain if you boil it.

not so sure abt that. pain is simply the awareness of a certain type of neural stimulus. nerves of this kind send signals to that part of the brain, and we get the sensation of pain. shouldn't be too hard to measure.

not sure what you mean by "techniques have existed for awhile now to capture how the brain models one's sense of self at least on a very rough level." i don't know of any such techniques or technologies. we can capture sense data (as when the signals sent by an eye are processed to create an image of what the eye sees), but that's a much simpler thing than the sense of self.

there's a bit about capturing activity "grandmother neurons" i.e. specific areas that fire up in recognition of your grandmother. stuff like that. pain really seems much more subjective than awareness though. you can demonstrably mediate people's experience of pain while still showing that the stimulus mechanisms haven't also been mediated. I don't know if you can do that with self-awareness.

what are you talking about?

we can't capture sense data!

MRI, blood flow stuff, sticking electrodes into people's heads and zapping, that kind of thing. also the drugs, weird inhibition with magnet stuff.
maybe there will be a commercial ego-blaster on the market some day where you can have a vacation from self-awareness by zapping a specific area.

there was a cool thing going around where they reconstructed people's dreams from their prior activations according to exposure to youtube clips.

i'd argue those things are as aware as a human is on those subjects, and probably more reliable. the map, though, being static, is as aware as a dead human. but if you put a pushpin on it, it's resurrected.

my first thought was "this is ridiculous!" but then i remembered that i'd said maybe a rock can be conscious, so idk anymore. but no-one knows anything about consciousness outside their own experience, despite what they claim, so saying idk is ok by me, in fact i should say thanks for shaking me out of whatever complacent position i'd settled in to.

maybe this is just a linguistic quirk, but there's a qualia of consciousness that is as problematic as the qualia of pain I don't think the qualia of consciousness has much to do with whether an entity is conscious or not, but pain is pretty much all qualia.

uh

what

?

we can't capture sense data!

sure we can, in a manner of speaking. we can measure the electrical activity in a cat's thalamus and from that data generate video imagery of what the cat is seeing. that's the capture of sense data in the sense i mean.

that's not true

i imagine you're talking about something like this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240562/scientists_read_minds_sort_of_reconstruct_images_from_brain_scans.html

the key part there is the "sort of"

hey look guys, this is what a supernova looks like

http://gothstore.piratemerch.com/images/joy-division.jpg

i call bullshit, those are the misty mountains

i see mickey mouse ears

http://corecanvas.s3.amazonaws.com/theonering-0188db0e/gallery/original/misty_mountains.gif

the map is not the territory son

http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf