Consciousness, A Discussion

I don't really care if consciousness dies when I die, but I see no reason to assume that it does. There is absolutely no evidence, and can be none, though, that matter creates consciousness and not the other way around. Sure, you can stop matter and stop consciousness, SEEMINGLY, but what happens when you stop all consciousness? Has anybody ever tried that? Is that even possible?

 

It's just another Scientific THEORY like the Theory of Evolution that is assumed to be true by many people while in the meantime the universal similarity of NDE's are completely ignored by these very same people.

 

Information is everywhere . Yet in this where of our conversation info from anywhere is translated to the
context of this social language . woo . Why will the backwoods hippie seek a backwoods hippie psychic
for help in interpreting a dream ? for translating the dream with b.h. social language and by this consider-
ing what was most important about it to backwoods hippie conciousness (of home) .

Why can't I know everything ? lack of context
Can conciousness as a personal identity go travelling about ? if you like
Can I be in your dream ? iffy, iffy , too iffy

 

what is that even supposed to mean?

 

Having watched only the first ~10 mins of that video relaxxx posted, I'd agree with the neuroscientist that consciousness is what goes away or stops in dreamless sleep, so we all experience no consciousness everyday. (Personally I think unconsciousness might be a better term here as there is still brain activity and perhaps certain physical functioning but I do not want to confuse this with the term often used in psychoanalysis). I also think heavy "black outs" from certain drugs including alcohol , as well as intense concussions would also fit this definition.

The way you have prompted these questions is kind of loaded, so I can easily see someone clinging to that word "SEEMINGLY" and retreat into that but all of these experiences at a certain degree or intensity if you will, cause a loss of the phenomenal awareness of individuality that we have defined as an integral component of consciousness, for the vast majority of people whom they occur too.

 

What context do you lack ? Perhaps you do not care to relate . You give no context
so that I might even attempt translating my message into otherwords .

Ethically , conciousness will not dictate reality .

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlxGBZifk6k

 

I don't agree that evolution is "just another theory" like the brain causing consciousness. We have vastly more evidence about evolution, from many more scientific disciplines.

 

This sentence is self-contradictory. No one ever experiences a lack of consciousness. If you are experiencing something, you are conscious of it.

If we could experience no consciousness that would be one thing, but we can't. Even when "experiencing" someone else's lack of consciousness, we are experiencing our own consciousness, so nothing is ever, as far as we can tell, existing completely independently of consciousness. I am not asking loaded questions. I feel I am being purely scientific and rational. We simply can't know that anything can exist independently of consciousness, because nothing will ever seem to.

I don't know if you could say that anybody or anything ever seems non-conscious, in truth. You can't really say where your own consciousness ends -- if there is even a dividing line between consciousness and "dead matter". As I have said before, and I honestly believe this, I'm not just being difficult, it could be that consciousness is really all that there ever is and matter is just how consciousness happens to seem.

What baffles me is how we apply time to consciousness, not knowing what either is. One is said to be an illusion and the other is most definitely not an illusion, but perhaps the only persistent thing we experience. That is the only reason why I say people are only seemingly ever non-conscious. Because if consciousness is all that truly exists, then there really is no time span occurring between unconsciousness and consciousness. Consciousness does not give its individual components preferential treatment. There is only consciousness, consciousness, and more consciousness. Even when someone else seems to be dead, consciousness doesn't seem to stop. And just as the sleeping awake, so may the dead awaken, given enough time.

I think the most pertinent thing that needs to be discussed in this conversation is the nature of time and how it relates to consciousness. Consciousness does seem to alter time, does it not? Some moments seem to last forever. We know that dreams that seem to last a long time can occur in only a matter of moments. I find consciousness to be timeless, in a sense. You can't ever really say "Well it's taking me so and so long to be conscious." How do you ever set a stopwatch by consciousness? You could say, "You've been conscious 4,200,494 seconds," but is-ness isn't really a matter of time. When something is, it eternally is or at least always was. I feel like I am making less and less sense, so I'll stop while I'm ahead, but you know what I'm saying! Everything has an eternal quality. Everything that is is a fact and facts are immortal in a sense.

 

Time is simply intervals applied to movements in space against the backdrop of the timeless Now. You can divide these intervals into infinite bits, but the isness of the Now is still ever-present.

And exactly as you said, even in deep dreamless sleep, consciousness is still obviously present, as there is something that notices the difference between deep dreamless sleep and dreaming sleep and awakeness.

I'm with you that i don't think there is any end or beginning to consciousness while alive or "dead". It's just eternal and timeless. Even in science there is the "law" that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so the intelligent energy that animates this body obviously goes somewhere once it leaves the body. It doesn't just disappear. The body itself rots into the ground and merges with the Earth. Seems to make sense that the consciousness that leaves merges with something else as well.

I want to go deeper into what you have talked about regarding Time, Timelessness, and Consciousness, as i have contemplated it for years and have tried to relate Time Travel to it, which would include relating Faculty X to it, but maybe i'll save it for another time. It's too much to type out right now.

 

I explicitly offered the term unconsciousness in the previous response, I'm comfortable going with that if "no consciousness" comes off as a misnomer, careful to note that I'm using it in a different manner than it is traditionally used in psychoanalysis.

Regardless, There are states of experience in life where there is no phenomenal awareness present from an individual yet they are still clearly alive, examples are pretty straightforward.

Prompting a question using words like seemingly are loaded questions.

 

And if you want to deny or view first person reporting of these experiences of losing consciousness as unreliable, then we are left with a scenario where consciousness is theoretically completely measureable and answerable by science. At that point, just need to settle on a concrete definition of consciousness.

 

We could get into a deep philosophical discussion about what it means to be alive here, but I'm not sure if that's what meagain intended with this thread. Whether or not a body can function and not be conscious doesn't really concern me. The fact that a body can function while "unconscious" doesn't contradict anything I've said.

Hm. Maybe it was a loaded question. When asking it, I certainly didn't think it would be possible for anyone to answer it. I was more or less trying to make the point that it is a complete mystery, however uncomfortable mystery seems to make some people.

I am curious as to why some people are so bothered by the idea of a mystery that can't be solved. I guess I always want certain mysteries to be solved, like Atlantis. Same kind of thing?

I'm not interested in reports of "losing consciousness" because at no point has consciousness been experienced to have been lost. One can say they are losing consciousness completely and forever, but then one just has to prove that. Are you telling me that someone knows what it seems like to be losing consciousness completely and forever and I'm just supposed to accept their feeling as truth? Then, "I feel like I'm never going to lose consciousness completely and forever."

Maybe I'm not understanding what you're saying. If I deny that someone's claim of a sensation of the inevitable utter annihilation of consciousness (forever) is to be taken as 100% concrete evidence that consciousness is dependent upon matter, then consciousness, in theory, can be completely explained by science? I apologize if I'm misreading what you're writing. So am I to assume that it can't be explained by science if I don't deny this person's sensation as being grounded in some truth? Usually it seems like people argue the opposite...that consciousness can be explained if it is definitely dependent upon matter. You seem to be saying that it can be explained if it isn't dependent upon matter.

I think we can understand more about consciousness, but I don't think we can completely explain it. There is no real way of testing it, as I made clear with my loaded questions. You just can't know completely what impact consciousness has upon the environment, because there's no way to eradicate it completely and still be able to experience what exists without it.

 

I am very interested to hear your thoughts, Chinacat.

I also came upon this article just now: http://themindunleashed.org/2015/02/time-never-never-will.html

 

I'm gonna check out here on this part of our discussion. First I don't follow the difference between what you are saying here and the no consciousness I was describing. The only way I can note a difference between us is you completely denying consciousness exists at all, which based on the rest of your posts I am going to guess that's not what you mean. Secondly, if you are not going to be interested in key phenomena which can lend insight into the nature of the topic, it seems as if I'm wasting my time.

 

I'll check out that link after I post this.

I've written down a whole host of concepts in something that I entitled "Manual For Time Travel" but I don't have the paper in front of me at this time. I will dig it up in the next few days.

In a nutshell, I feel that you don't necessarily need a Time Machine to travel in time. I think that your brain and Consciousness is quite enough of a potential Time Machine, as that is the fundamental place where Time is experienced.

I feel that the Timeless Now is somehow the key ingredient to Time Travel. Ironically, the Timeless is the anchor and key to Time and therefore Time Travel is what my hypothesis is.

One thing that you know for certain is that you never have and never will escape the Now (even if you learned how to Time Travel).

And this Now is the backdrop for all movement of objects through space, all the way down to the smallest movement or growth. The Now is the backdrop in the same way that space is the backdrop for objects to exist in.

Even with the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, there is still just a movement of an object in space against the backdrop of the Now.

Everything is just vibration. This isn't the only way to look at "everything", but it is certainly true that you can say that this statement is true. You can also say that everything is Energy that's Vibrating.

So if you can release the notion of moving forward in time, and realize that all that there actually EVER is, is the Now, then you can start to become much more playful with your intervals and approach to Time itself. You can literally create your own intervals of Time if you wanted to.

Every moment and event has its own Timeless essence. If you've ever gone through the experience of recalling a memory very vividly, and you almost get a scent or real sense of that time and place in that moment, then I believe that at that moment you are tapping into Faculty X (Colin Wilson created the term and you can look up more info on it online). But basically, Faculty X is the evolution of the species' brain to be able to be present not only in the here and now but also other times and places. If you can look at an old object and sense its history and stories and all that it has been through, you are at that moment tapping into Faculty X. Now that we aren't as much in fight or flight as much as we used to be in our evolution, this dormant capacity becomes available to humans when they enter a relaxed, contemplative mode of being.

I think that with accessing the timeless qualities of objects, or even time periods, such as the '60s for example, you are bringing that Timeless Now into THIS Timeless Now, and are essentially even at the most subtle level creating that moment at this moment. Now I am only talking about the past, but I think you can also do this when getting visions of the future. And there is an unlimited capacity to bring more and more of past and future moments into THIS moment, as you already quoted that Einstein said that all of them exist NOW.

 

No, you have the conscious experience prior to going to bed and the conscious experience prior to waking in where you can judge the changes in your setting by your clock, the night , to morning etc. That is how you know that there has been a difference following a dreamless sleep.

 

That video discussion was pretty good, it touched on several things we have discussed here. I found it fascinating to hear the neuroscientist discuss the relation of memory and consciousness, which is something I asked MeAgain I believe prior to this thread in some discussion leading up to it. Based on video, I'm starting to see memory as much as an integral part of consciousness as qualia, yet memory and consciousness seem to overlap as in a Venn Diagram type way, where they have distinct features as well.

Just so we're dotting our i's and crossing our t's, I want to point out that the neuroscientist Tononi featured in the video relaxxx posted developed the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) that is mentioned in the link that ChinaCat (I think neonspectraltoast originally linked) posted here. However the article is not written by Tononi and it seems to advance certain ideas, which do not seem particularly representative of Tononi's theory as described in the video discussion.

 

No. Only from the wakefulness space are you able to come to your conclusion that consciousness isn't there in unconsciousness. Unconsciousness isn't the same as NO consciousness. If you believe that consciousness ends when you die, but you also feel that it ends when you're in dreamless sleep, then you are equating dreamless sleep, fainting, comas, etc. all with death.

Nonetheless, an awareness within you is witnessing all of the changes. This change notice is how you know that Consciousness is present in dreamless sleep. It's not like your consciousness suddenly just disappears. Do your arms and brain disappear as well? Obviously not. Why would it be there for dreams and not for when there is no dreams? Is it only there for watching a movie and not for sitting and doing nothing? This conclusion of yours makes no sense.

 

And so what is the essential difference between the article and the video?