Consciousness

[DBT]

Newton was a student of the occult, but not in terms of gravity. Gravity is something that everyone experiences, so noone can serieously question the reality of, only its nature or label (your Newton example) .....what you are essentially claiming is that 'gravity' is not physical, that the physical world somehow channels gravity from some unknown, undetectable dimension. Now just substitute 'gravity' to 'consciousness' and you have your belief.

You are really lost.

You seem incapable of forming rational connections and thrash about blindly for meaning.

I am not coming close to saying gravity is not physical. That is not supported in anything I have said.

Quoting from my post: ''Now just substitute 'gravity' to 'consciousness' and you have your belief.''

To state the obvious, the analogy is related to your unsupportable belief in disembodied consciousness and not literally gravity.

That's the nature of an analogy. Hope this helps you to understand the concept of analogy, but as for your unfounded ideas about consciousness, there is no hope.

I can't force you to comprehend what you read and think rationally.

.

No, that is you. You just showed that you cannot comprehend the concept of an analogy. Just a hint, the analogy of 'gravity' represents your claim for 'consciousness'

I even said as much, yet it still escapes you; ''Now just substitute 'gravity' to 'consciousness' and you have your belief''

I suggest that brush on the concept of analogy. Just a hint, it's not literally about 'gravity'

 

[untermensche]

You are really lost.

You seem incapable of forming rational connections and thrash about blindly for meaning.

I am not coming close to saying gravity is not physical. That is not supported in anything I have said.

Quoting from my post: ''Now just substitute 'gravity' to 'consciousness' and you have your belief.''

To state the obvious, the analogy is related to your unsupportable belief in disembodied consciousness and not literally gravity.

That's the nature of an analogy. Hope this helps you to understand the concept of analogy, but as for your unfounded ideas about consciousness, there is no hope.

I can't force you to comprehend what you read and think rationally.

.

No, that is you. You just showed that you cannot comprehend the concept of an analogy. Just a hint, the analogy of 'gravity' represents your claim for 'consciousness'

I even said as much, yet it still escapes you; ''Now just substitute 'gravity' to 'consciousness' and you have your belief''

I suggest that brush on the concept of analogy. Just a hint, it's not literally about 'gravity'

Gravity is not an analogy.

You are seriously lost.

 

[DBT]

No, that is you. You just showed that you cannot comprehend the concept of an analogy. Just a hint, the analogy of 'gravity' represents your claim for 'consciousness'

I even said as much, yet it still escapes you; ''Now just substitute 'gravity' to 'consciousness' and you have your belief''

I suggest that brush on the concept of analogy. Just a hint, it's not literally about 'gravity'

Gravity is not an analogy.

You are seriously lost.

It has nothing to do with gravity.

I could have said 'invisible magic pixies.' Your position on the nature of consciousness being another version of the god of the gaps fallacy,

You are sad because your argument 'we don't understand x, therefore y, has no merit and so you turn to ad homs for solace. Which is understandable. I too would be sad in your position.

Or you could try to do better and provide actual reasons why consciousness is not a material process/activity of a brain in the face of the fact that structural and chemical changes do alter consciousness.

You claim correlation when it can be easily proven that drinking too much alcohol effects the brain and consequently effects consciousness.

That is not correlation. It is causation.

You knowingly and willingly alter your consciousness by altering your brain chemistry.

You get drunk.

 

[untermensche]

It has nothing to do with gravity.

I could have said 'invisible magic pixies.' Your position on the nature of consciousness being another version of the god of the gaps fallacy,

By not accepting your unproven dogma I am invoking gods?

You can't explain consciousness yet you claim to know everything involved. That to me seems the religious view.

You claim correlation when it can be easily proven that drinking too much alcohol effects the brain and consequently effects consciousness.

That is not correlation. It is causation.

It shows that normal brain function is correlated with normal performance. It can't possibly say that normal brain function is all that is involved because consciousness has not been explained yet.

Congratulations, you understand the brain is involved in the production of consciousness.

Making the 90's the decade of the brain wasn't a waste after all.

But the question is: How does a brain create something that can have a unified incredibly varied experience? A unified personality able to uniquely express themselves that lasts decades.

For that matter how do cells create the ability to experience even the most simple thing in the most simple organism?

Right now you can't even begin to answer that question.

 

[fromderinside]

On continuous experience.

Perception of sound, tactile stimulation, and light research teaches us how humans and many mammals (monkeys, possums, rats, cats, dogs etc) perceive stimulus over time. In each case there is a progression of experiences from individual events to continuous precept. Light flashes become steady or moving light, sound bursts become tones and noises, individual touches become vibration of areal space sense. None of these changes from the instant to the period require any intervention of a consciousness to explain.

Each sense channel has physical constraints, some mechanical, others temporal, still others spectral, and transitions from one to the other are pretty well understood and defined in the literature. individual sound events become tones as the result of compensating systems for limitations in nervous and receptor following capacity. Mechanical limits force sound to be presented to the the nervous system though an organ structured to receive high frequencies first, low frequencies last with compensating sub systems of neurons covering ranges of frequency to compensate for time difference in signal processing.

The story is one of living things adapting capabilities to process information over time.

For instance, within the mammalian auditory system, Receptor cells transduce mechanical activity to neural activity by mechanically inducing transmitter molecules to travel to neurons as the result of hair movement in a fluid filled organ. Neurons limited to frequencies mostly below those of the frequencies received accommodate by a process called convergence to form spectral channels upward through individual analysis brain substrates. Temporal errors in spectral processing induced by the time limited character of the receiving organ are compensated by a system of receptor cells that apply regional corrections proportional to the filter attributes of the receiving system as the information travels up the auditory pathway to primary auditory cortex.

Remember, we are just explaining continuous experience here.

Limitations in auditory receiving capacity force mostly more rapid than neuron rate to group inputs, after a short period of reception to codes for tones related to the place from which they arose on the Basilar membrane. Now after about 300 milliseconds of input are converted into fairly well defined tones; signals from the mid brain up to to cortex all the while, after about ten milliseconds, the cortex is sending feedback don a descending pathway which communicates with the ascending pathway mostly at well defined mid brain and hind brain structures.

To recap, this comes from more than one hundred and fifty years of research of scientists using all sorts of signals of all sorts of duration measured at all levels of the brain. At the level of which I am most familiar, the precept level, perceptions of signals goes from clicks to tones pretty rapidly over as little as ten milliseconds becoming more precise up to about 300 milliseconds. All this corresponds to the nature of neural activity as acoustic information is processed up the ascending auditory pathway. No magical consciousness is needed to explain the nature of the signals nor the precepts since they converge with neural activity. The same properties explain how unrelated sound interrupting speech actually provides the information for one to recover that which has been masked.

Similarly the visual system and tactile systems have been found to treat incoming information over time going from precepts of undefined visual and tactile nature providing only limited direction and location information to well defined scene and pattern precepts convergent with associated neural activity and coding through research which has also progressed similarly to audition over the past 150 years.

Why did I go to such effort to lay out a process?

Some on this thread claim that such cannot be explained by simple physical limitations and nervous systems adaptations, saying there must be a unifying consciousness thing that makes these continuous precepts possible. What is so incongruous about the argument of these consciousness thing adherents is that when what is known about how information is input and output by living things through their nervous systems is applied to complex interactions of this information the same models that explain sense and precept also explain speech, memory, unified place and situation, and all other more complex versions of information are found underlying these as well.

Complexity does not create emergence or experience or consciousness, knowledge of how things work creates onto properties of combination demonstrating that the complex is defined by combination of the less complex. If one would only look at elementary models of combination, say how hydrogen and oxygen becomes water when combined two to one becomes water. Its been established that the properties of each when combined result in liquid water between about 3 degrees C and 99 degrees C and transitions to ice at lower temperatures and vapor at higher temperatures all derived from on rules of combination of properties of each.

Sometimes it's important to understand what 19th century scientists understood when we go jumping to new generalizations for the very complex things with which we work today. Just because there is quantum mechanics for the extremely small, it turns out it becomes deterministic when we are looking at the macro world without exception. Yes, combining properties is expensive and difficult. Many of the things we use are not very well understood without combination. Take the time to work out the complete attributes of each and the rules of combination among the several combined and one will be satisfied I am right. Jumping to emergence is a bit like Trump saying about something "I heard ..."


untermenche this post is mainly for you.

 

[untermensche]

Perception of sound, tactile stimulation, and light research teaches us how humans and many mammals (monkeys, possums, rats, cats, dogs etc) perceive stimulus over time. In each case there is a progression of experiences from individual events to continuous precept. Light flashes become steady or moving light, sound bursts become tones and noises, individual touches become vibration of areal space sense. None of these changes from the instant to the period require any intervention of a consciousness to explain.

The perception of sound is many things.

It is the transformation of physical energy into neural "communication".

It is the production of that which is experienced (sound).

It is the production of that which experiences the sound (consciousness).

We understand the first two a little bit.

We understand the third not at all.

 

[fromderinside]

One needs to get down into the workings to talk about the experience. If that 'experience' is just physical reclamation through adaptations of biological/neurological equipment to provide information suitable to deliver a tiger's roar that sounds like a tiger's roar then we're probably not talking about some magical thingie that integrates clicks into a tiger roar gestalt.

Experiencing tonality is part of afferent process design and function, purely physical. To say otherwise is to have to explain why full appreciation of a tone cannot be attained in less that x ms which just happens to be the time it takes for the physiological filter to react full efficiency. Its in this process where your experience and consciousness concepts get buggered.

 

[DBT]

Right now you can't even begin to answer that question.

This is the very essence of your non argument: we don't know x (how the brain forms consciousness) therefore y (it could be something outside the brain)

It's not a valid argument.

And you continue to studiously ignore the facts of brain agency: structural and chemical changes to the brain alter mind/consciousness in specific ways, alcohol, LSD, etc, effecting the production and expression of conscious experience.

This is not correlation, it is causation. Taking LSD, for example, alters brain chemistry and consequently alters the mind/conscious experience.

This is something that is repeatable, verifiable and cannot be dismissed or argued away.

You don't have a leg to stand on.

 

[untermensche]

One needs to get down into the workings to talk about the experience. If that 'experience' is just physical reclamation through adaptations of biological/neurological equipment to provide information suitable to deliver a tiger's roar that sounds like a tiger's roar then we're probably not talking about some magical thingie that integrates clicks into a tiger roar gestalt.

Experiencing tonality is part of afferent process design and function, purely physical. To say otherwise is to have to explain why full appreciation of a tone cannot be attained in less that x ms which just happens to be the time it takes for the physiological filter to react full efficiency. Its in this process where your experience and consciousness concepts get buggered.

I am talking about "that which experiences"; consciousness.

Not the experience. That which appreciates Mozart, not the music.

They are two separate things.

You seem to think that simply describing the experience is enough.

You model does not include "that which experiences".

You are not even addressing consciousness, just the things consciousness has access to.

 

[untermensche]

This is the very essence of your non argument: we don't know x (how the brain forms consciousness) therefore y (it could be something outside the brain)

It's not a valid argument.

You really have no conception of logic and logical thinking.

You are capable of aping the bad conclusions of others and nothing else.

We don't know x (how consciousness arises)

Therefore we cannot conclude the brain is the only thing involved.

It is as simple as that.

But simple logic is beyond you.

Taking LSD, for example, alters brain chemistry and consequently alters the mind/conscious experience.

If consciousness is something used by brains and not produced by brains then changing the chemistry of the brain would change how consciousness is experienced.

Just as damage to the speaker of a radio alters the sound, but the transmission of the sound is not altered in the least.

 

[LordKiran]

Gravity is not an analogy.

You are seriously lost.

It has nothing to do with gravity.

I could have said 'invisible magic pixies.' Your position on the nature of consciousness being another version of the god of the gaps fallacy,

You are sad because your argument 'we don't understand x, therefore y, has no merit and so you turn to ad homs for solace. Which is understandable. I too would be sad in your position.

Or you could try to do better and provide actual reasons why consciousness is not a material process/activity of a brain in the face of the fact that structural and chemical changes do alter consciousness.

You claim correlation when it can be easily proven that drinking too much alcohol effects the brain and consequently effects consciousness.

That is not correlation. It is causation.

You knowingly and willingly alter your consciousness by altering your brain chemistry.

You get drunk.

So off-topic question, what are the implications of this for trans-humanism/transcendentalism? Does this mean we can't become androids?

 

[LordKiran]

You really have no conception of logic and logical thinking.

You are capable of aping the bad conclusions of others and nothing else.

We don't know x (how consciousness arises)

Therefore we cannot conclude the brain is the only thing involved.

It is as simple as that.[1]

But simple logic is beyond you.

Taking LSD, for example, alters brain chemistry and consequently alters the mind/conscious experience.

If consciousness is something used by brains and not produced by brains then changing the chemistry of the brain would change how consciousness is experienced.[2]

Just as damage to the speaker of a radio alters the sound, but the transmission of the sound is not altered in the least.

1. Saying "Anything is possible" doesn't really mean as much as it probably seems. A scientific understanding of our reality relies on the axiom that miracles of any kind are not possible ever. So obviously the implication of the scientific method is that not everything is actually possible.

2. Says who? Sounds like a pretty unsubstantiated assumption on your part. I can see how you would jump to that conclusion, but it's a conclusion based on nothing as far as I can tell. Further, this is coming from the person who JUST IMPLIED that 'anything is possible.'

 

[fromderinside]

One needs to get down into the workings to talk about the experience. If that 'experience' is just physical reclamation through adaptations of biological/neurological equipment to provide information suitable to deliver a tiger's roar that sounds like a tiger's roar then we're probably not talking about some magical thingie that integrates clicks into a tiger roar gestalt.

Experiencing tonality is part of afferent process design and function, purely physical. To say otherwise is to have to explain why full appreciation of a tone cannot be attained in less that x ms which just happens to be the time it takes for the physiological filter to react full efficiency. Its in this process where your experience and consciousness concepts get buggered.

I am talking about "that which experiences"; consciousness.

Not the experience. That which appreciates Mozart, not the music.

They are two separate things.

You seem to think that simply describing the experience is enough.

You model does not include "that which experiences".

You are not even addressing consciousness, just the things consciousness has access to.

There is a very big hole in your assertion. The experience of the entity is while the being experiences, the being who experiences the experience is another.

Generalizing that which can experience the experience is any observer of the experience and their experiences are all different and less than the experience since they are not the experiencing being. All the experiencing being can do is reflect on what he has experienced since what the being experienced is not available until the experience has taken place. To structure the experience as the one who experiences suggests there is a controller, an overseer, an arbitrator who decides what is to be experienced, a dualistic presumption. That notion has long since been dispelled by empirical work.

 

[untermensche]

You really have no conception of logic and logical thinking.

You are capable of aping the bad conclusions of others and nothing else.

We don't know x (how consciousness arises)

Therefore we cannot conclude the brain is the only thing involved.

It is as simple as that.[1]

But simple logic is beyond you.

If consciousness is something used by brains and not produced by brains then changing the chemistry of the brain would change how consciousness is experienced.[2]

Just as damage to the speaker of a radio alters the sound, but the transmission of the sound is not altered in the least.

1. Saying "Anything is possible" doesn't really mean as much as it probably seems. A scientific understanding of our reality relies on the axiom that miracles of any kind are not possible ever. So obviously the implication of the scientific method is that not everything is actually possible.

That is a poor reading of what is right in front of you.

...we cannot conclude the brain is the only thing involved...

How exactly does this devolve into the useless "anything is possible"?

It is a comment on a positive claim that cannot be demonstrated. The claim that the brain is all that is involved.

2. Says who? Sounds like a pretty unsubstantiated assumption on your part. I can see how you would jump to that conclusion, but it's a conclusion based on nothing as far as I can tell. Further, this is coming from the person who JUST IMPLIED that 'anything is possible.'

Of course it is true. If consciousness is something external to brains then changing brain chemistry would change how the brain is dealing with something external. Not changing what is external.

But it is a big "IF".

 

[untermensche]

I am talking about "that which experiences"; consciousness.

Not the experience. That which appreciates Mozart, not the music.

They are two separate things.

You seem to think that simply describing the experience is enough.

You model does not include "that which experiences".

You are not even addressing consciousness, just the things consciousness has access to.

There is a very big hole in your assertion. The experience of the entity is while the being experiences, the being who experiences the experience is another.

This makes no sense at all.

Sound is experienced.

By only one thing.

Not by the brain. By a consciousness.

This goes back to the biggest flaw in your model.

Why is there a consciousness experiencing sound if it has no control over the body to respond?

 

[DBT]

It has nothing to do with gravity.

I could have said 'invisible magic pixies.' Your position on the nature of consciousness being another version of the god of the gaps fallacy,

You are sad because your argument 'we don't understand x, therefore y, has no merit and so you turn to ad homs for solace. Which is understandable. I too would be sad in your position.

Or you could try to do better and provide actual reasons why consciousness is not a material process/activity of a brain in the face of the fact that structural and chemical changes do alter consciousness.

You claim correlation when it can be easily proven that drinking too much alcohol effects the brain and consequently effects consciousness.

That is not correlation. It is causation.

You knowingly and willingly alter your consciousness by altering your brain chemistry.

You get drunk.

So off-topic question, what are the implications of this for trans-humanism/transcendentalism? Does this mean we can't become androids?

I can't see why artificial systems can't be integrated with the neural networks of the brain. Some questions being: do we want to and what possible problems may emerge, brain hacking, direct external control by others, etc.

 

[DBT]

You really have no conception of logic and logical thinking.

You are capable of aping the bad conclusions of others and nothing else.

No, that's still you with your unfounded claim; we don't know x (how the brain forms consciousness) therefore y (it could be something outside the brain)

We don't know x (how consciousness arises)

Therefore we cannot conclude the brain is the only thing involved.

It is as simple as that.

That's your version of the god of the gaps fallacy; we didn't know how the earth formed, therefore tt had to be the the work of god almighty.

But simple logic is beyond you.

Logic means not making unfounded assumptions and arguing as if they are facts. We have absolutely no evidence to even suggest that the brain is a receiver for non material universal consciousness.

The very opposite is true, the available evidence supporting brain specific consciousness.

You have your own unique notion of logic that resists the efforts of all of your opponents.

Just as damage to the speaker of a radio alters the sound, but the transmission of the sound is not altered in the least.

There is no evidence for consciousness receptors with the brain. The reason why we have sense organs being not to receive non material consciousness, but to gather information from the physical external world, which is transmitted to respective processing structures, eyes to visual cortex, memory integration, internal imagery of that specific information formed: sight.

Logic dictating that this is a physical process of representation of information from the senses, and not receiver from some non material realm.

But of course, you have your very own brand of logic.

 

[untermensche]

We don't know x (how consciousness arises)

Therefore we cannot conclude the brain is the only thing involved.

It is as simple as that.

That's your version of the god of the gaps fallacy; we didn't know how the earth formed, therefore tt had to be the the work of god almighty.

You are making the positive claim.

You are claiming the brain is the only thing involved, with very bad logic and no evidence.

That is the religious claim here.

I am saying: Your claim has not been proven.

Hardly a dogmatic position and a million miles from a god in the gaps argument.

We have absolutely no evidence to even suggest that the brain is a receiver for non material universal consciousness.

If it is out there it is not "non material". Material just means everything that is out there.

And some reasons to entertain the possibility are that consciousness can freely and willfully move the body and freely use words to express unique ideas. Consciousness has the ability to act on the brain and get it to do things.

This is not proof of any kind that consciousness is external to the brain, but it is difficult to model an internal consciousness with these capacities, you are using a model with only internal capacities and that is why you try to deny the clear phenomena of voluntary movement and expression. It is hard to model using only internal capacities.

 

[DBT]

That's your version of the god of the gaps fallacy; we didn't know how the earth formed, therefore tt had to be the the work of god almighty.

You are making the positive claim.

You are claiming the brain is the only thing involved, with very bad logic and no evidence.

That is the religious claim here.

I am saying: Your claim has not been proven.

I am claiming that the available evidence supports brain agency, and I have provided a more than ample body of information to support this position. A position that is not personal, but for all practical purposes, universally accepted by researchers.

That mind/consciousness is altered by chemical and structural changes in quite specific ways cannot be disputed. in response to this you make the claim of brain as a receiver of some sort of inexplicable non material consciousness, something that has no evidence.

You have no case. There is no case.

Quote;
''Ask yourself, is the functioning brain identical to the mind? If your answer is no, you are a closet dualist. You believe that brain and mind are made of different kinds of stuff. Such a stance will make it hard for you to understand the nature of consciousness. It will make the mental aspects of our lives mysterious and unknowable.

I am a working neurologist who sees brain disease causing mental dysfunction every day. Take the case of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. If she does not recover pretty much full brain function, her mental states will be altered, and she may not be able to function in Congress as she did before the bullet damaged her brain. If the bullet had done more damage than it apparently did, she might not now be fully conscious. Hopefully she will recover. There is the famous case of Phineas Gage, however, in which brain damage to the frontal lobes of the brain by a railfoad spike turned a sober, hard-working man into a lout. His mind was altered because his brain was altered. He was a different person after that spike went through his brain.''

The main reason many people remain dualists, however, is because they find it impossible to believe that brain function can entirely explain consciousness. They think that after all the neurotransmitters have hit their receptors and all the neurons have fired, there is still something that has been left out of any explanation of consciousness. The thing that has been left out, they say, is the conscious feeling of what is like to be in a certain state. Furthermore, all the whirling electrons cannot explain why a certain neuronal configuration results in our seeing blue rather than red. Another objection that I have heard is, "What about my soul"? So they conclude than consciousness cannot be fully explained by brain function. But if that is true, where is consciousness and what is it?

As a neurologist, I contend that consciousness is nothing more than the ability of our brain to acquire information (which is the state of being awake) AND all the content that the information contains AND the ability to get all that information into and out of memory. The key word is "ALL". If you have all that, you are conscious of the blue sky and the red sun. Nothing more is needed to be conscious of that beautiful sky. My contention is that the brain can do all that, and, therefore, a functioning brain is identical to a conscious mind. That makes me a materialist and not a dualist. In the coming months, I want to explore these ideas. I want to hear what you think, your objections to my position and your arguments for and against these ideas.''

 

[untermensche]

You are making the positive claim.

You are claiming the brain is the only thing involved, with very bad logic and no evidence.

That is the religious claim here.

I am saying: Your claim has not been proven.

I am claiming that the available evidence supports brain agency, and I have provided a more than ample body of information to support this position. A position that is not personal, but for all practical purposes, universally accepted by researchers.

You've been shown the error of your ways over and over and all you do is fall back into your same irrational loop. A broken record unable to make or understand rational arguments.

A spike in brain activity is something to explain, not evidence that consciousness does not have agency. And of course a spike in activity is interconnected to all other brain activity so it is impossible to conclude with any assurance what is causing what.

That mind/consciousness is altered by chemical and structural changes in quite specific ways cannot be disputed. in response to this you make the claim of brain as a receiver of some sort of inexplicable non material consciousness, something that has no evidence.

Again, this is only evidence of correlation. No matter how many times you mindlessly repeat it as if it is a magic spell.

To know causation you would actually have to understand what brain activity means in terms of consciousness vs activity below consciousness. All you know is areas of activity. You don't have the slightest clue what that activity means and introducing external electricity to the brain does not tell us about normal activity. It tells us what happens when artificial external stimulation is applied.

And these comments by this neurologist are just dogmatic claims. He doesn't know what consciousness is any more than you do.

I worked with stroke patients as a physical therapist for 25 years. I'm now a pharmacist.

I fully understand that brain damage has all kinds of effects on what the brain can do.

But none of that is an explanation of what consciousness is or what the total relationship between the brain and consciousness is.

It is so easily refuted with the example of the radio and how damage to a radio effects performance while as we all know the radio is not the only thing involved.

What you want me to believe is the BIG DECEIVER model of the brain.

It is continually deceiving people into thinking they are making conscious choices and decisions, but it is actually making all decisions robot fashion.

It is an absurd model that needs a lot of explaining.

Why have this consciousness thinking it is making decisions? In your model it is absolutely unneeded.

Why this continual waste of neural energy if according to you it is not needed?

You are the one in need of serious explanation.

These previous six sentence are my most salient points and what you have never addressed and what nobody here has addressed. Why the continual deception? Why this incredible waste of energy? According to you the brain does not need consciousness in the least. It makes all decisions and also makes consciousness think IT is making them. An absurd model if I ever heard one. Explain.