Consciousness, A Discussion

I wonder if this thread is more of a make believe game than some actual pursuit of truth. Reading some of this shit, I get the feeling that I've stumbled into a fantasy role playing session. "I'm a wizard and you're an elf and lets pretend consciousness is a supernatural nebula transcending all space time...". The mind is just a total mystery and anyone who dares point out that there is a preponderance of medical and scientific evidence that proves consciousness is a collective function of neural brain activity... is just a big bad fantasy game spoiling jerk wad.

Brain surgeons can turn off consciousness with some electrodes and a flick of a switch. You can't turn off consciousness by putting any other body part asleep other than sections of your brain. The human mind is a physical neural network that takes two decades to mature, for this neural wiring to fully complete. Any physical changes or chemical alterations to the brain causes an immediate change to its mental and "spirit" state. "Spirit" as in mood is a physical chemical/electrical state of brain activity. There is no reason why supernatural fantasy nebula of consciousness would need 20 years for an individual spirit node to mature.

 

Not sure where you're getting all this. Elves? Wizards? Spirits? Supernatural? Who said anything about those. Much of what's been said so far has to do with the concept of consciousness as sentience or subjective phenomenal awareness--nothing necessarily mystical about that. MeAgain and I have posted summaries of empirical research dealing with consciousness, which so far haven't been addressed because we're still trying to get past the fine tuning on the concept. The latest posts seem to be about the borders between full consciousness and semi-conscious states. There's a lot of fascinating brain research that seems to be relevant. Nothing that you say, however, challenges the proposition that consciousness is a "hard problem". I think there's compelling evidence that consciousness is connected to the activity of a physical brain, although neuroscientist atheist Sam Harris tells us : "the idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it." (End of Faith, p. 208.) Long before brain surgeons could "turn off consciousness with some electrodes and a flick of a switch", boxers could turn it off with a good right (or left) hook to the chin. No disputing that.. But "nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, declares it to be a bearer of that peculiar interior dimension that each of us experiences as consciousness in his own case." ( Harris, p. 208) If you have evidence to the contrary, please share it with us. (Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield's research on electical simulation of the brain might be a place to start. His patients didn't just remember but actually re-experienced past events when their brains were stimulated. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/brain/cortexhistory2.html

 

That would be Sam Harris's point of view and not a reflection of the medical science community. All the rational empirical evidence points to consciousness being a product of brain activity, there is absolutely nothing to the contrary. This should be common knowledge to any rational educated person. The fact that one atheist thinks it can not be absolutely proven does nothing to enforce another persons fantasy of supernatural transcendence. Just like "Oh look he's agnostic therefore my God fantasy is more valid". It is a pure belief of faith, of God and supernatural spirits, when there is ZERO evidence. Just lies and anecdotes with a preponderance of evidence and logic that implicates otherwise. Sam Harris was idiotic to state that medical scientists need any FAITH of brain consciousness when all evidence and logic support this with procedures that can be replicated ad nauseam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LErLQL0GKyo

 

Your reliance on the sciences and professionals puts you at a disadvantage here, Okiefreak. Concerning discussions like these they only provide the minute details for concepts which we can already conclude from experience and reasoning.

This is what we know from experience and reasoning alone:

As living beings we are perpetually striving to obtain distinction amongst otherness.
--This work-in-progress at obtaining distinction is primarily our brain-body. It's vulnerable to the outside environment and has needs from the outside environment, so it's far from completely distinct, but certainly has a clearly demarcated boundary, which is the skin.

What comprises our consciousness is entirely contained within our brain-body.
(If one tells me that he's been able to have experiences outside of it then I'd like him to answer this question: If he can perhaps see inside a room for which his eyes have no access and hear inside a room for which his ears have no access, then what purpose do his eyes and ears serve?)
--We confuse the issue when we quote professionals debating whether the findings of other professionals are what they say they are. (Such as the issue where a neuroscientist boldly proclaims neurons to be the sole function of the brain and consciousness, and a philosopher claims he hasn't prove anything -- it doesn't matter, concerning this type of discussion we don't even need to know where the brain is in our body, or that we have a central processing center rather than a more dynamic system though out our body.)

Every behavior of ours is rooted in our past.
--This is manifested both through our inheritance, meaning our ancestors' past and our experiences, meaning our personal past.
--This includes all the issues we discuss and all the questions we ask.

 

Your mind is no mystery because you live in a house with one window facing the street and a back door locked from outside . I
can't quite imagine how that door got locked since you think no mind could be out there in the yard . To prove this you can
believe that the yard in back is surely , awfully , over-grown and uncivilized .

 

And yet, Science still has zero evidence that the brain actually creates Consciousness...just assumptions that it does...

 

Then what do you call this when you argue that there's absolutely nothing to the contrary? http://scienceissexy...ists-spiritual/

 

To Guerillabedlam: During "self-aware" dreams the frontal and frontolateral parts of the brain are more active. Normally these areas are shut down during dreaming.

 

I asked for science and you give me Depak Chopra? What scientific studies have determined that we understand the nature of consciousness? (BTW, I happen to believe that it is a product of neurological processes in the brain, but that's just my opinion.) My theological interest in consciousness has to do with the fact that we have it, regardless of what produced it. Since otherwise we wouldn't be aware of our own existence, not to mention that of other people and the universe, consciousness seems to be an extraordinarily fortuitous fluke, if not a miracle. To me, the strongest evidence for your point of view is the line of research pioneered by the late Wilder Penfield and the Montreal Institute of Research showing that electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex could elicit dreams, smells, auditory and visual hallucinations, out of body experiences, and the re-living of long lost memories. But of course eliciting them and creating them are not quite the same thing. ChinaCat Sunflower02 brought to our attention the research of Christoph Koch, who thinks that consciousness or proto-consciousness may simply inhere in all matter--an idea also advanced by the distinguished mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

 

I openly admit that I want to pretend to be a wizard/elf.

 

That Harris quote is very specific with the operative word being produce. There are several examples in medical and scientific literature which show alterations to the brain affecting consciousness, examples ranging from Phineas Gage getting a crowbar through his head, to the mind expanding effects of LSD and other psychoactive substances which mimic and/or have similarities to brain molecules, to changes in moods and personality from people with certain tumors and Alzheimers, but I also do not really know of any science that substantiates the brain producing consciousness and would be interested in papers/abstracts/sources you may have.

The surrounding text of that Harris quote may provide more context but I do find it interesting that Harris does not believe in free will and much of that argument revolves around neurochemistry, yet he leaves open some doubt here in regards to consciousness. Perhaps the quote may be mentioned as more of a formality rather than any significant challenge to the links that show that changes in brain states consistently show interactions with consciousness.

 

^ Skimming over a blog from Harris regarding consciousness, I see I underestimated his adamancy in regards to these views. I do not follow how he can reconcile his assuredness of our lack of free will, while maintaining that it is unlikely consciousness emerges from unconscious processes.

 

It's just funny to me how relaxxx and all science-oriented people who have the same view as him are bashing the "wannabe wizards" for their "fantasy beliefs" and yet somehow believing that the brain creates and produces consciousness with no actual evidence for this is somehow different?

 

I accept the idea that one's conciousness ends with death . In this light , communicating with the dead is time travel - as the living now
may touch a loved one's last eternally diminishing and passionate moment of dying .

The action of conciousness is to touch essentially . No feeling = death

 

If the latest Neuroscience theory that neonspectraltoast has posted is true, then it wouldn't make sense that your consciousness dies when you die. Consciousness is everywhere.

 

Yes,I think Harris seems to be separating the origins of consciousness from environmental influences on it, and distinguishing between consciousness itself and particular states of consciousness, like moods, thoughts or awareness of particular things.Besides being a neuroscientist and atheist, he's an avid long-time practitioner of Buddhist meditation. In his book Waking Up. he makes the case that our egos are illusions, diffuse products of brain activity, and by abandoning this illusion we can can wake up to reality.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWfRWdeuPb4&feature=youtu.be

 

The fact is is that you don't have proof that the brain creates consciousness. Until you do, then you need to stop being a hypocrite with your words.