Consciousness, A Discussion

I feel I don't need to repeat myself again regarding the unconsciousness/ no consconsiouness thing, it is degrading to a really stupid level.

I have already said ( I believe repeatedly) that brain activity is still occurring when an individual is asleep, so if it is solely a neurological process, there is a fundamental difference that cannot be understated between dreamless sleep and death, however otherwise in terms of the experience of consciousness, dreamless sleep and death could be comparable.

There is a french term for the male orgasm called "The little Death" which I believe is an idea that is present in some Eastern Philosophies as well. Drawing upon that analogy, I might consider dreamless sleep as something similar, perhaps even more deserving of that phrase.

 

The notable difference is Tononi kept the theory related to the human mind, even positing some possible reasons why the theory cannot apply, at present, to things like machines.

The article suggests it may be applied to the internet and I believe non-organic life. However, I'm not suggesting the article misrepresents IIT necessarily, it mentions another proponent of the theory, who may have a slightly different take on the implications, I just mentioned it as I found this interesting.

 

The space ahead can see us coming , so go stand there . You have the genius to locate it with calculations
of galactic proportion .

Once there was a woman who stood upon the moon , and she wrote a song from there that was meant to be danced
with dignity and softly sung in chorus . Tis' a Gift To Be Simple . Isn't to create here on earth yet stand upon the moon
a holograph of delight and inspiration ? Tis' a Gift To Be Free . Embrace space .

The info you receive through being freely concious may present itself to your social mind in any variety of
sense-oriented forms for interpretation and sharing . Even as you read these words , the understanding of these words ...
well , the understanding is all yours . If you want to have holographic understanding , probably I wouldn't notice that you
are here with me and looking about the room as I write . You might be able to describe an object in this room , or will
you hear the opera I hallucinate ? the woo , woo be earthy and low

 

This is the same argument essentially as our argument regarding the experience of being drunk. And your argument still makes zero sense. No matter how you slice it, being drunk isn't an "unreal" experience. Neither is dreamless sleep. They are both experiences of Consciousness. There may be no SELF-Consciousness in dreamless sleep, but there is certainly consciousness. Dreamless sleep is not the same as death, where the consciousness literally leaves the body. Consciousness is just in a dormant and non-reflective state in dreamless sleep.

And in Zen "the Little Death" is sometimes referred to ego death and spiritual awakening and the realization of non-dual, everpresent Consciousness.

 

if "consciousness' is in a "dormant and non-reflective state in a dreamless sleep" to the point of not being awake aware at some level, it's not really consciousness. It's unconsciousness.

 

I meant to leave a comment about this video but I'll try to address that right now. There's really a lot of talk about meditation and transcendence in this video, it really could be called the science of meditation. If one is not paying attention to the start and the title, one might think this is reinforcing the fantasy that there really is an experience of actual supernatural transcendence. That is not the case, it is an illusion created by the mind. The video explains how conscious levels are learned experiences through neural plasticity and brain neural development throughout a lifetime. We are a product of our environment. Consciousness is an overall experience of processing an immense amount of information; sensory information, emotional nervous system, reward chemicals, memories and so on. Every day from infancy our brain decides to reinforce neural networks it feels are most relevant and disconnect others. Most of this information management is done during sleep.

Every part of our consciousness is a learned experience, from the feel of water to the enjoyment of food to the emotions of family bonding to beliefs in Gods and spirits... Some experiences take longer to learn than others. "Practice the presence of God", ever hear that one? The more you practice a feeling, or connection, or meditative state, the stronger and more automatic that experience become to you. Even if it is a complete illusion based on lies you have been told from childhood. Spiritual transcendence is a learned illusion. All the real science explains how the brain develops and creates these illusions. All the real science points to consciousness residing in the brains cortex, the information processing hub of the mind. Evidence and rational explanations are not FAITH. Faith is belief without any evidence, faith is belief in something that contradicts logic and evidence.

The supernatural spiritualists have some explaining to do, as I asked before, why would a supernatural spirit mind need 20 years to reach maturity? Do you completely reject the fact that we are products of our environment and learned information? If you do acknowledge that we are a product of environment then what relevance is a supernatural soul? Without information? A comfortable and convenient learned fantasy?

 

I think the experience of nature is more than an environmentalist can define .
I think all that's necessary for conciousness is feeling , which is so much more than
being responsive to someone's probing , measuring and questioning .
I think that when I fall asleep with the radio on - I dream of a radio on . And even when
I bash that thing to plasma with rocks it's still talking at me . Then eventually exhasperated
I realize I should wake up and actually push a switch .

 

And unconsciousness is not the same as NO consciousness. If something happens behind your back that you're unconscious of, that doesn't mean that you have suddenly lost consciousness altogether. It means that you're not conscious aka unconscious of what somebody is doing behind your back. A big difference.

 

You are saying there may be no Consciousness :rofl:

I can't take your objections seriously when followed by this stuff China, it's full on woo-woo mode.

 

No, actually you're just misunderstanding something very essential. Animals also don't have Self-consciousness. They don't seem to be able to reflect on the fact of their existence. They just exist. Same with babies. They also don't have self-consciousness. However, consciousness is still fully operating.

If you didn't actually have any consciousness during dreamless sleep, then you wouldn't even be able to conceptualize the experience of dreamless sleep, or even know what it is.

 

I haven't had time really to get into your two video postings, but they seem to be quite good and basically in line with my understanding of consciousness. A few quibbles: "Supernatural" is a concept I tend not to use, since it tends simply to denote that which doesn't fit our existing paradigms, subject to change with advances in knowledge. And I don't think of faith as belief without "any " evidence, and certainly not belief in "something that contradicts logic and evidence". Faith is, as Luther put it, a "joyful bet". A good gambler places educated bets on the basis of the best available evidence. Faith fills in the blanks, where evidence is unavailable. At least that's how I use the term. And I don't acknowledge that we are completely products of our environment and learned information. Cognitive psychologist and psychobiologist Steven Pinker challenges that notion in The Blank Slate, in which he argues that all humans are born with innate biological traits inherited from our ancestors. I don't think that's inconsistent with your point that consciousness is a natural phenomenon. As for transcendence, if we take the modifier "spiritual" away, I think it can usefully be related to emergence, which scientists like biochemist Stuart Kaufman and physicist Robert Laughlin have pioneered as a naturalistic alternative to scientific reductionism.

 

How have I denied that consciousness exists at all? What key phenomena am I not interested in?

 

I'll leave the first paragraph be, because those are your opinions that cannot be substantiated one way or another, particularly that of the animals example. I don't necessarily agree but I'd just be offering opinion in return.

To the second part, Again, yes you can conceptualize dreamless sleep based on the changes of your awareness before going to bed to that of upon waking. I'm not sure it's even possible that an existing coherent term or phrase cannot be conceptualized.

 

Tononi said it beautifully: "Consciousness is what fades when we have dreamless sleep." Agreed?

 

Yes

 

The awareness within you is still witnessing the difference between dreamless sleep, dreaming, and being awake. Therefore, consciousness is operating during dreamless sleep. Consciousness is also operating during clinical death during the various accounts of near death experiences.

Do you notice how you don't realize that you're dreaming unless you're good at lucid dreaming? Nonetheless, you are still dreaming, and your consciousness is still operating. The same goes with dreamless sleep.

How can consciousness just disappear during dreamless sleep and then reappear during dreaming sleep and wakefulness? I'm not the one sounding "woo woo" here. Consciousness doesn't just disappear and then reappear. That's as absurd as saying that your heartbeat disappears during dreamless sleep and then reappears when you wake up.

 

Prompts some intriguing ideas, I have yet to read Consciousness Explained but particularly after this discussion, I am more intrigued to check it out.

http://youtu.be/vkaS5JWZ1hY

 

I certainly agree, at the point of conception we are a product of ancestral environments, millions of years of evolution. Emergence is a good word, if it means what I think it is, that consciousness is the sum product of trillions of parts interacting inside the mind. It is in a sense an illusion but also very real and dependent of all the parts and especially their order. Like a mosaic image.

Is this a picture of a woman's face or an illusion? Why is it a picture of a face? Why does the face become clearer if you blur your vision?

 

We are talking about different functions here. For the sake of this point, let's assume consciousness is produced by the brain. If this is so, you have already provided an example where our brains produce an entirely unique level of complexity compared to the rest of the animal kingdom in this quote..

It does not seem like a stretch and I'm pretty certain a valid argument could be made that human brains perform uniquely from other organs in this instance.

The mystery therein lies how does this emergent phenomena develop the perceived 'directed' organization we experience with consciousness?