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What Is Consciousness?

Jobbo said:
... and still you fail to account in any way for the actual evidence supporting consciousness as an illusion. If you think it's wrong, you have to account somehow for the observed phenomena.

Gravity itself still works normally at the electric brae and this can be measured. Your statement is not analogous with anything I've said.
That's because you have continuously insisted on changing the goal posts, not only with me, but also with Garrick92. You do not appear to have any real concept of consciousness, self, or self awareness, as both Garrick 92 and myself, previously pointed out.

If there is no agreement as to the terms under discussion, there is no discussion.
 
And what exactly does this mean?
Jobbo said:
The best example of this, I think, is when someone speaks, you don't need to wait until the very end of their sentence until you suddenly get the impression that you fully understand their meaning. If consciousness was real-time then you would expect that to be the case.
Why does a 'real time' model of consciousness preclude other levels of process at work in the mind?

All along you have been saying that, according to Dr Blackmore, the evidence points to our 'conscious selves' being an illusion. I have been saying that since our 'conscious selves' are the only way we can interpret our relationship to ourselves and our external reality in any kind of meaningful way, then 'consciousness as illusion' as a model for consciousness seems extraordinarily presumptious.

But, then science does tend to say only that which can be measured is real. I say that the important bit that is me, whatever that is, is not measurable and you call me ignorant.

I have brought in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, quite legitimately to prove my point that there are limits to what can be known and you choose to try and use it as proof of the supremacy of scientific method.
Heisenberg site:Implicaitons of Uncertainty
Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927
"I believe that the existence of the classical "path" can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it."
SO I have to ask, what is the observer that can make such real changes in the quantum world, simply through the act of observation? What makes the observation? A conscious observer? Could an illusion have a real effect in this way?

Simply to say that we are also many hidden mental processes and brain functions detracts from the fact that the decision to observe the sub-atomic particle is a conscious choice and the observation is a conscious act.
 
Emperor Zombie said:
The explanation for that is:
"the configuration of the land on either side of the road provides an optical illusion making it look as if the slope is going the other way."

which means its no more than a parlour trick, it's not saying that gravity is an illusion at all...its saying that something is making you think gravity is doing a trick when actually gravity isn't doing anything other than what it normally does. the configuration of the landscape, like a loaded deck, is fooling you into thinking that gravity is doing something that we commonly accept it shouldn't.
Gosh! And I thought... :p

It is an excellent example of a real and genuine illusion though. Unlike the combinations of physicality, mind, and being that can trick the unwary into thinking they are illusions and don't really exist in any kind of meaningful way. And they go on to prove it, scientifically, too.
 
Androman, I really don't get what your objections are to Susan Blackmore's theory.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is more to do with the fact that the concepts of position and velocity we use on the macro scale do not apply in the same way at the subatomic level. It's part of the progression of knowledge, not a dead-end as you appear to believe consciousness is.

We perceive consciousness as a real time phenomenon but the example I gave is just one of many which show definitively that it is not. That aspect alone is definitely illusory. Don't you find that interesting and in need of further investigation? What is your problem with examining this scientifically?

In relation to not understanding the concept of consciousness, I put it to you that nobody does as it's so ill-defined. I've asked for an unambiguous definition and nobody has given me one. As for self-awareness, that's a different matter and relatively easy to understand.

Where's the objective evidence that the observer in any observation has to be your conscious self?
 
Emperor Zombie said:
It certainly is. but its the deviding line between conciousness and perception really.

I deal in animation. within a 25 frame rate per second (digital, not film, before some pedant leaps on me) animators trick their audiences into believing a "form" of reality. I like to think of it as "shorthand" reality. when Windsor McCay first showed the world his animation of a dinosaur walking through the holland tunnel back in the victorian era, people ran out of the theaters thinking a monster was on the screen. you look at it now and it'd make you think those people must have been incredibly stoopid.

I was talking along similar lines with my cousin recently. When we were kids we were terrified by Ray Harryhausen's special effects in the Sinbad and mythology films. Yet, my cousin's kids find them laughable now, after exposure to Jurassic Park etc.
 
Much as I'm enjoying this new turn of the discussion, I don't believe it is correct to call the development of aesthetic sense, 'evolution.' This is a mainly cultural development, like so much of human interaction with the environment and with each other.

I remember reading of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), sitting, sketching pictures with some Arab tribesmen as they chatted. When they became curious, he showed them a drawing of a camel he had just done. They didn't recognise it, he then showed them a sketch of their leader, the Sheik, they didn't recognise that either. This was put down to the fact that Arab Islamic culture and art is very definitely non-figurative. They hadn't seen any figurative drawings before with which to make comparisons.

Art and film are learned just like languages. The big difference is that these languages are still under development, thanks to modern technology. You might say that a language would not be able to affect people emotionally and subconsciously in the ways described, however, think poetry, music, dance.

As to fear and the irrational response. I have read of work which suggests that certain fears actually exist as potentials, hard wired in some way in the mind. We may never have seen a spider, or a snake before, but when we see our first, an atavistic flight response is more likely to be triggered because of a biological pre-disposition. This can become over-reinforced very quickly and becomes essentially deeply grooved into the subconscious as something irrational and difficult to control. That really would be an evolutionary throwback, to our more animal past.

I do see a problem with subjective and objective views of consciousness and the nature of Conscious-self-awareness on this thread. There definitely needs to be some clarification of terms.

Could it be that this whole 'illusion of consciousness' problem means that the 'subconscious' is back in fashion?
 
AndroMan said:
Much as I'm enjoying this new turn of the discussion, I don't believe it is correct to call the development of aesthetic sense, 'evolution.' This is a mainly cultural development, like so much of human interaction with the environment and with each other.

I remember reading of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), sitting, sketching pictures with some Arab tribesmen as they chatted. When they became curious, he showed them a drawing of a camel he had just done. They didn't recognise it, he then showed them a sketch of their leader, the Sheik, they didn't recognise that either. This was put down to the fact that Arab Islamic culture and art is very definitely non-figurative. They hadn't seen any figurative drawings before with which to make comparisons.

Art and film are learned just like languages. The big difference is that these languages are still under development, thanks to modern technology. You might say that a language would not be able to affect people emotionally and subconsciously in the ways described, however, think poetry, music, dance.

As to fear and the irrational response. I have read of work which suggests that certain fears actually exist as potentials, hard wired in some way in the mind. We may never have seen a spider, or a snake before, but when we see our first, an atavistic flight response is more likely to be triggered because of a biological pre-disposition. This can become over-reinforced very quickly and becomes essentially deeply grooved into the subconscious as something irrational and difficult to control. That really would be an evolutionary throwback, to our more animal past.

I do see a problem with subjective and objective views of consciousness and the nature of Conscious-self-awareness on this thread. There definitely needs to be some clarification of terms.

Could it be that this whole 'illusion of consciousness' problem means that the 'subconscious' is back in fashion?

Very much so but some of the proponents now seem to prefer to call it the "preconscious."

I think you're hitting the nail on the head with the subjective / objective dichotomy. I totally concede that the objective scientific details of consciousness discussed in these theories seem to have no bearing on the (very important on a personal level) subjective elements of consciousness. That's the best way I can think to word why I don't think the theory devalues consciousness. If it's the personal religion I described then we have no choice but to subscribe - it's part of the very fabric of being human.

Note from the references I gave that the consciousness also appears to have veto powers over intended actions as they happen, meaning it is involved in free will.

I'm also keen to understand more about the consciousness's role in forward planning, e.g. choosing where to concentrate my effort, choosing where I want to visit on holiday and what I want to do when I get there, choosing which books I'll read etc. These things to me are from where the real quality of human life springs. I'm not sure any of the experiments have addressed this and that's why I'm (slowly) reading "The Mind and Brain" book I referred to, which does seem to enter this territory.
 
I got the sketches the wrong way round. The first sketch was of the Sheikh, the second was of a camel. That makes more sense, they didn't even recognise the camel, apparently, because they hadn't seen figurative drawings before.

Thinking about, they may have been, good humouredly, taking the piss out of the slightly crazy Englishman. :)
 
Jobbo said:
I'm also keen to understand more about the consciousness's role in forward planning, e.g. choosing where to concentrate my effort, choosing where I want to visit on holiday and what I want to do when I get there, choosing which books I'll read etc. These things to me are from where the real quality of human life springs...
So, what, or who is trying to take control of, and direct, the 'illusion,' then? ;)
 
AndroMan said:
So, what, or who is trying to take control of, and direct, the 'illusion,' then? ;)

Maybe that's the bit we just don't have access to yet! Or, maybe it isn't really controlled or directed - that's just a part of the illusion.:eek!!!!:
 
AndroMan said:
I got the sketches the wrong way round. The first sketch was of the Sheikh, the second was of a camel. That makes more sense, they didn't even recognise the camel, apparently, because they hadn't seen figurative drawings before.

Thinking about, they may have been, good humouredly, taking the piss out of the slightly crazy Englishman. :)


more likely , lawrence was no good at drawing . probably drew a stick camel .
 
dictionary.com seems to capture it for me. whether this is ambiguous or not is down to whoever is interpreting the definition.
The mystery of life is part of what makes it so interesting. I think there are somethings that will never be understood but who knows what time will do to our level of ability of interpreting our surroundings and ourself. Its a comfy fence uve got round these parts.

state or condition of being conscious.
A sense of one's personal or collective identity, including the attitudes, beliefs, and sensitivities held by or considered characteristic of an individual or group: Love of freedom runs deep in the national consciousness.

Special awareness or sensitivity: class consciousness; race consciousness.
Alertness to or concern for a particular issue or situation: a movement aimed at raising the general public's consciousness of social injustice.
In psychoanalysis, the conscious.
Having an awareness of one's environment and one's own existence, sensations, and thoughts. See Synonyms at aware.
Mentally perceptive or alert; awake: The patient remained fully conscious after the local anesthetic was administered.
Capable of thought, will, or perception: the development of conscious life on the planet.
Subjectively known or felt: conscious remorse.
Intentionally conceived or done; deliberate: a conscious insult; made a conscious effort to speak more clearly.
Inwardly attentive or sensible; mindful: was increasingly conscious of being watched.
Especially aware of or preoccupied with. Often used in combination: a cost-conscious approach to further development; a health-conscious diet
 
Science finally entertains the possibility that everything with a nervous system might be 'conscious' to a greater, or lesser degree.
Consciousness: a headache on a dimmer switch?
By Guardian Unlimited 19th October 2006
James Randerson is a Guardian science correspondent


There was a time when the study of human consciousness was out on the wacky fringes of science. It was the sort of thing you got into if you liked a heavy dose of philosophy, new age thinking and probably soft drugs with your science. As the US philosopher Dan Dennett once quipped: "With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery."

The real reason why consciousness is still a mystery, though, is that understanding it is so head-hurtingly difficult. How do you measure someone's personal, subjective experience? Scientists tend to feel very uncomfortable when there is not anything they can see and count.

But the neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, who is director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain believes that times are changing. She will tell an audience at University College London on Friday night that brain scientists are starting to make progress. She has said:

The big idea is that consciousness is not all or none. You are not just conscious or unconscious. It's like a dimmer switch.

This way of looking at things throws up some difficult questions, because it means that any creature with a nervous system is conscious, to some extent.

"The big problem with saying consciousness comes in degrees is of course there is no clear boundary," Baroness Greenfield says. "There's no clear boundary in foetal development, and there is no clear cutoff in the animal kingdom."

Here we start opening up some serious cans of worms. If a foetus with a nervous system is conscious, how does that affect the abortion debate? Since there is no conscious cutoff between animals and humans, can we justify eating something that shares at least some aspects of our experience of the world?

When I pressed Baroness Greenfield on what the new science means for these questions she was, unsurprisingly, not keen to put her head too far above the parapet.

I don't want to take a side on the abortion debate. I'm not qualified. I'm not a mother. I've never been in that terrible position of having to make that terrible choice, and I certainly don't want to start moralising or pontificating about abortion as such.

All I would say is that it would be an issue that would have to be incorporated into people's thinking on both sides.

A foetus is conscious, but not as conscious as a child. Of course a foetus is conscious because nothing magic happens in the birth canal to turn the lights on.


...
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
Science finally entertains the possibility that everything with a nervous system might be 'conscious' to a greater, or lesser degree.

The weird thing is that there was ever any doubt.
 
Long article

The blurred reality of humanity
Do we really even exist? Fooling ourselves into thinking we do is the one thing that makes us who we are
By Julian Baggini*
Monday, 21 March 2011

If you can be sure of one thing, then surely it is that you exist. Even if the world were a dream or a hallucination, it would still need you to be dreaming or hallucinating it. And if you know nothing else about yourself, surely you know that you have a mind, one perspective on the world, one unified consciousness?

Yet throughout history, there has been no shortage of people claiming that the self doesn't exist after all, and that the individual ego is an illusion. And such claims are no longer the preserve of meditators and mystics. The only disagreement many scientists would have with philosopher Thomas Metzinger's claim that "modern philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience together are about to shatter the myth of the self" is that the destruction has already occurred.

There is a wide range of scientific evidence that is used to deny "I think, therefore I am". In René Descartes' famous deduction, a coherent, structured experience of the world is inextricably linked with a sense of a self at the heart of it. But as the clinical neuropsychologist Paul Broks explained to me, we now know the two can in fact be separated.

People with Cotard's syndrome, for instance, can think that they don't exist, an impossibility for Descartes. Broks describes it as a kind of "nihilistic delusion" in which they "have no sense of being alive in the moment, but they'll give you their life history". They think, but they do not have sense that therefore they are.

Then there is temporal lobe epilepsy, which can give sufferers an experience called transient epileptic amnesia. "The world around them stays just as real and vivid – in fact, even more vivid sometimes – but they have no sense of who they are," Broks explains. This reminds me of Georg Lichtenberg's correction of Descartes, who he claims was entitled to deduce from "I think" only the conclusion that "there is thought". This is precisely how it can seem to people with temporal lobe epilepsy: there is thought, but they have no idea whose thought it is. 8)

You don't need to have a serious neural pathology to experience the separation of sense of self and conscious experience. Millions of people have claimed to get this feeling from meditation, and many thousands more from ingesting certain drugs.

While some people experience lack of self, some seem to have more than one. Most obviously there are sufferers of dissociative identity disorder, the preferred term these days for multiple personality disorder. Perhaps even more interesting are the "split-brain" patients of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. As a last resort in an experimental procedure to treat severe epilepsy, Sperry and Gazzaniga severed the connection (the corpus callosum) between the two hemispheres of the brain. The results of this operation, called a commissurotomy, was that the epilepsy was indeed much reduced. But then Sperry and Gazzaniga conducted some experiments that revealed a remarkable, unforeseen side effect.

Patients were asked to focus on a dot in the centre of a screen. Words and images were then flashed up for a few seconds on either the right or left side of the screen. When these appeared on the right side of the screen, the patients were easily able to say what they were. But when they appeared on the left of the screen, they claimed to have seen nothing. However, if asked to draw an object with their left hand, they would draw what they had just seen, all the time denying they had seen any such thing. They could also manipulate or use the object normally with their left hands. So what was going on?

The way in which vision works is that information from the right visual field is processed by the left brain hemisphere, while information from the left visual field is processed by the right hemisphere. But it is the left hemisphere that (in most people) controls speech. Because normally the corpus callosum allows the two hemispheres to communicate, this presents no practical difficulty for most people. But after a commissurotomy, this information exchange cannot occur. That means that if you control carefully which side of the brain receives information from the environment, you can effectively make one hemisphere aware of something that the other is not. What is astonishing about this is that for this to be possible, there would have to be two centres of awareness in the individual concerned. Commissurotomy therefore seems to show that selves can be divided – at least temporarily – or that they needn't have just one centre of consciousness after all.

Intriguingly, however, in normal life, such patients experience the world in the normal, unified way. Gazzaniga's explanation of this is that "we don't miss what we no longer have access to". Consciousness of self emerges from a network of thousands or millions of conscious moments. This means that when we lose bits, the way a split-brain patient does, we don't sense anything as lost at all. Gazzaniga explains this thought with a metaphor of a pipe organ. "The thousands or millions of conscious moments that we each have reflect one of our networks being 'up for duty'. These networks are all over the place, not in one specific location. When one finishes, the next one pops up. The pipe organ-like device plays its tune all day long. What makes emergent human consciousness so vibrant is that our pipe organ has lots of tunes to play."

Gazzaniga's metaphor holds for healthy as well as damaged minds. In other words, what the numerous pathologies of self-experience expose is that even in normal cases, there is no unified "I" behind experience. Rather, to use another musical metaphor, the mind is like a jazz orchestra that usually plays with sufficient harmony to disguise the fact that it lacks a single player, a score, or even a conductor. A few bum notes or absent musicians, however, and the illusion is shattered.

This is not an idea most are comfortable with. "People do not want to feel that the continuity of their life is just a matter of which molecules are arranged in which order inside their brain," the psychologist Susan Blackmore told me. Similarly, Broks said, "we have this deep intuition that there is a core, an essence there, and it's hard to shake off – probably impossible to shake off, I suspect. But it's true that neuroscience shows that there is no centre in the brain where things do all come together."

Astonishing though this thesis can sound, there is a danger here that we could overstate just what this lack of a unified pearl of self at the heart of us really means. Many writers, such as Blackmore and Metzinger, draw the conclusion that the self is an illusion. This is true in the sense that it is not what it seems to be. But that is not to say that the self doesn't exist.

This can be most simply explained by thinking about what it means for anything other than fundamental particles to exist. In Buddhist philosophy, there is an analogy attributed to Sister Vagira, a contemporary of the Buddha's, which compares a person to a cart. There is no cart, she says, only the wheel, the axle, the flat bed and so on. In the same way, there is no self, only experiences, thoughts, and sensations. But, of course, there is a cart – it's just that it is nothing other than the ordered collection of parts. In the same way, there is a self – it is simply no more than the ordered collection of all our experiences.

To take an even simpler example, water is not something that has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom: it just is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. In the same way, we are not things that have experiences – we just are our experiences.

Neuroscience and psychology provide plenty of data to support the view that common sense is wrong when it thinks that the "I" is a separate entity from the thoughts and experiences it has. But it does not therefore show that this "I" is just an illusion. There is what I call an Ego Trick, but it is not that the self doesn't exist, only that it is not what we generally assume it to be.


*['The Ego Trick' by Julian Baggini is published by Granta (£14.99) .... ]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 47591.html
 
I'm always fascinated by scientists' attempts to turn round fast enough to see the back of their own necks in a mirror.

:lol:
 
Pietro_Mercurios said:
I'm always fascinated by scientists' attempts to turn round fast enough to see the back of their own necks in a mirror.
Scientists are too crafty to try that - they just use a second mirror! ;)
 
Baggini is putting himself about a bit - here he is in New Scientist (does he have a book to plug? - Oh yes!):

The self: why science is not enough
15 March 2011 by Julian Baggini

Can science explain the self, or is that just neuro-scientific hubris? There's no need to take sides

THE nature of the self, identity, and human values used to be the preserve of philosophers, but over recent decades psychologists and neuroscientists seem to have thoroughly colonised the territory.

For instance, in the 1960s Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga famously severed the corpus callosum in several people with epilepsy and found that the left hemisphere of the brain could be aware of things the right was not aware of, and vice versa. Then in the 1970s, Benjamin Libet discovered that certain bodily movements were activated in the brain before the person consciously decided to do them, challenging conventional notions of free will.

A decade on, and Michael Persinger brought religious experiences into the domain of neuroscience by inducing them in subjects using transcranial magnetic stimulation. Moving into the 21st century, and neuroscientists such as Todd E. Feinberg and Antonio Damasio continue to use research into the brain to shed light on how our sense of self is created and sustained.

In contrast, my book on self and identity, The Ego Trick, contains just one chapter on the science of the brain. Why? Because I would argue that on the big questions about who we are, recent research has told us a great deal about the physical basis for the emergence of the sense of self, but next to nothing about what a self actually is.

Take the question of what the seat of the self is. For millennia, in the absence of any real understanding of consciousness, it seemed credible to believe that thought required some kind of immaterial soul. The big contribution of empirical science has been to identify the brain, working with the central nervous system and to some extent the whole body, as the main organ responsible for consciousness.

But this very general idea is hardly cutting edge. As long ago as 1664, Thomas Willis published Cerebri Anatome, a detailed attempt to explain how different parts of the brain produced the different "animal spirits" that were believed to power thought and action. More importantly, even before the brain's role in consciousness was fully appreciated, philosophers such as the British empiricists John Locke and David Hume had already worked out that what you are isn't a question of the stuff you are made out of anyway, be it spirit or matter. What makes you the same person over time is, broadly, the continuity of your mental life. The continuity of the same brain in the same body matters only in so far as it makes this possible. As cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter memorably put it, "it ain't the meat, it's the motion". We knew this before neuroscience peered into the brain and discovered what makes that motion happen.

But what about the much finer-grained work of recent years, pinpointing exactly which parts of the brain are responsible for the various aspects of consciousness? This is clearly extremely interesting and clinically useful, but philosophically speaking it really only filled in the details and hammered the last nails into the coffins of antiquated views of soul and self. Neuroscientists, for example, agree there is no place in the brain where "it all comes together", no locus of the self in one part of the cerebrum. A sense of self turns out to be something that emerges as the result of most parts of the brain working together.

Using Feinberg's model, the self is a "nested hierarchy". This means that the higher functions of self - self-consciousness, for example - are not independent of the lower functions, like the basic awareness of one's environment, but incorporate and depend on them. So the higher functions of the evolutionarily newest part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, require the more primitive instinctive and emotional functions of the limbic system (amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus) and the automatic bodily regulation functions of our "reptilian brains" (the brain stem and cerebellum).

While the detail Feinberg adds to our understanding is scientifically invaluable, in philosophical terms this is no astonishing discovery, just a confirmation of what Hume thought over 200 years ago: there is no thing which is you at all. Each of us is merely a bundle of thoughts, sensations and experiences. Pretty much the same view was held by the Buddha, who believed that there is no abiding self, just a series of connected conscious experiences. Neuroscience confirms this and explains the mechanics of this centreless self, but it certainly didn't discover it.

What about free will? Surely neuroscience has taught us some serious facts about that? It is a popular view, most recently echoed by Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape, where he cites experiments by Libet and others which show that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected 350 milliseconds before a person is aware of deciding to move, and that some decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before people are aware of having made them. "All our behaviour can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge," writes Harris. "This has always suggested that free will is an illusion."

But even here, the philosophers were way ahead of the game. It has been obvious for centuries that if human beings are made entirely of physical stuff, and all physical stuff simply follows the laws of physics, then there is no room in human action for any causal power other than the motion of matter. So to go back to Libet, whether consciousness comes before, after or simultaneously with decision-making, the key point is that thoughts and decisions are produced by no more than a brain working according to the laws of physics.

What else could a decision be but the product of a combination of the present state of being, fashioned by the past, and the environment that a person finds themself in? From at least Hume onwards, many philosophers have understood that the only meaningful sense of free will is action free from coercion or force, not action exempt from the causal necessity of the physical world. To that debate, neuroscience adds nothing.

I don't wish to disparage neuroscience. On the contrary, I am in awe of what is being discovered about the mechanics of mind. But it is simply a philosophical mistake to think that understanding more about the nuts and bolts of the basis of self and identity must add something to our fundamental understanding of what makes us the individuals we are. Some scientists agree. "I don't think the self is ultimately a scientifically tractable question," clinical neuropyschologist Paul Broks told me while I was writing The Ego Trick.

The main reason is that the very notion of a science of the self depends on us identifying its subject - the self - from the perspective of first-person experience. Science can correct false beliefs about what sustains that experience, and it can explain what makes such experience possible, but it cannot change what it means to be a self without erasing the very data it depends on.

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Julian Baggini is a philosopher, with a PhD from University College London on the philosophy of personal identity. Among his books are The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, and The Ego Trick (Granta Books, March) - on which this essay is based. He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Philosophers' Magazine


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... ?full=true
 
I certainly am conscious and exist, I have severe doubts about the rest of you.
 
BlackPeter said:
I certainly am conscious and exist, I have severe doubts about the rest of you.

If I stop thinking about you then a silent tree will fall on you in a forest.
 
I was trained in neurology and neuroscience. Did a spell in Psychology and Psychiatry, including working in the Crazies section of a fairly high profile Psychiatric Hospital. I started out as a very devout disciple of the brain-is-mind school. But after five or so years of working with people with brain tumors, strokes, dementia, schizoid disorders, etc, I started to feel that most brain-science was a kind of giant self-delusion. We'd tinker and poke and go 'ahaah', when we got some response, but at the end of it what did we actually know about how the brain works, let alone what the answer to the mind/brain puzzle might be?

A lot of people involved in these fields would rush to say "sure we know so much more than we used to", but I think I have to disagree. There's a lot of observation, and a whole hell of a lot of theory. But actually solid, scientific, applicable, replicable fact?

IMHO you could write it up on a post-it and have room left for illustrations.

For example, when a neuroscientist tells you he knows how vision works - he's kinda lying. What he knows is how it doesn't work, mostly. He knows that in most people damage to the so-called Visual Cortex will result in impaired sight. But he also knows (though he'd probably try and pretend he doesn't) that this isn't universally true. He knows there are rare, embarrassing and not-much-discussed cases of people who can see perfectly despite having severe damage to their Visual Cortex, or even in some rare cases, having no discernible Visual Cortex at all.

In fact, heck, we have examples of people functioning normally with barely any measurable brain at all!

Words like 'compensation' are used to explain these bizarre aspect of neurology. But ask anyone what 'compensation' actually might entail as a mechanism and they can only guess.

As for how consciousness is created or what it might be - we are about s far away from being able to explain that as my dog is from figuring out how the TV works.
At least that's my cynical viewpoint after thirty years in the business. And that's what makes me a little mad at the ridiculous reductionism of too many modern day commentators who like to talk as if we have the universe pretty much sorted.

hell, we don't even have our own insides sorted people.

;) :roll:
 
I agree and nominate for the "Posts of Fortean Excellence"

(I know we only have a "Threads of Fortean Excellence" but some posts really deserve celebrating and that was definitely one of them)

:yeay:
 
I have a notion that consciousness comes from a loop – one set of brain processes running independently to the other, yet both are aware of each other. If each are not just aware of each other, but privy and influential to each other's "thoughts"... that's a weird thing to imagine. It's like someone reading the mind of someone reading their mind, and seeing into their own head.

But would this cause positive feedback in thought form, amplifying the impulses to an unmaintainable level? I guess it that would only happen if the the input was the same "frequency" as the output, but I guess it might get changed during the loop...

Perhaps our brains develop not to notice this effect is going on. It's like those 3D pictures where you have two images side by side and you cross your eyes to see it – when you get it right you have a perfect stereoscopic image, not two separate ones... We get the illusion of one conscious mind.

So I guess that puts me in the illusion camp? Although I don't see it so much as an illusion, more a real and beneficial process of a complex brain.

Maybe - it's all awfully complicated for this time of night :)
 
Images capture moment brain goes unconscious
By Jennifer Carpenter, Science reporter, BBC News

For the first time researchers have monitored the brain as it slips into unconsciousness.
The new imaging method detects the waxing and waning of electrical activity in the brain moments after an anaesthetic injection is administered.
As the patient goes under, different parts of the brain seem to be "talking" to each other, a team told the European Anaesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam.
But they caution that more work is needed to understand what is going on.

The technique could ultimately help doctors pinpoint damage in the brains of people suffering from stroke and head injury.

"Our jaws just hit the ground," said anaesthesiologist Professor Brian Pollard from Manchester Royal Infirmary on seeing the images for the first time.
"I can't tell you the words we used as it wouldn't be polite over the phone."

Although regions of the brain seem to be communicating as "consciousness fades", Professor Pollard cautions that it is early days and that he and his team from the University of Manchester still have many brain scans to analyse before they can say anything conclusive about what is happening.

The finding supports a theory put forward by Professor Susan Greenfield, from the University of Oxford, that unconsciousness is a process by which different areas of the brain inhibit each other as the brain shuts down.

The new technique, called Functional Electrical Impedance Tomography by Evoke Response (fEITER), is more compact than other brain imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and so is easily transported into the operating theatre.
It involves attaching tens of electrodes to the patient's head, which send low electrical currents through the skull. The currents are interrupted by the brain's tissues and electrical signals.

Professor Pollard explained that the brain's structures should not change over a minute-long scan, and so any differences that he and his team see as the patient falls asleep must therefore be due to changes in their brain's activity.

It is hoped that this technique could be used to learn about the nature of consciousness, but it is also likely to help doctors make headway in monitoring the health of a person's grey matter after they have suffered a head injury or stroke.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13751783
 
Touche, Alice. Reductionism beyond the point of absurdity is so patently...absurd.

OK so I assume it'd be fine to hook up Susan Blackmore to some electrified nipple clamps and give her 110V because, as she will surely be the first to agree, there isn't really any such thing as "pain", "pain" is only an illusory experience undergone by an illusory "self" in response to certain kinds of stimulation to a neural system. The only "real" thing happening is that electrons are flowing and neurotransmitters are transmitting.
 
IamSundog said:
OK so I assume it'd be fine to hook up Susan Blackmore to some electrified nipple clamps and give her 110V

I'd definitely watch that documentary :)
 
glad to know there's at least one out there whos sense of humor is as sick as mine.
 
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