Consciousness

[DBT]

Humans have their programming and the brain has it's.

And it is unlikely the "programs" of the brain resemble human constructions.

Vision is not a reflex.

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Which cube is the reflex?

How is it I can switch from looking at one cube and then another at will?

Why do the "reflexes" of the brain switch from one cube to another? What is motivating them to do something like that?

How do reflexes create something new?

Your brain is forming and generating the perception of the image, including you looking at the image and switching perspective ''at will''- the brain is forming you, your will and your whole experience with the cube.

Should there be a malfunction in the underlying production activity, 'you' lose perspective, you lose the ability to switch 'at will' because it was never you the conscious self that formed the experience in the first place. Just as it is not you the conscious self generating your own conscious existence.

The brain is the sole agency of all experience. Your autonomous consciousness idea is false.

 

[untermensche]

The brain is what allows me to switch my view at will.

To say the brain is doing it on it's own is unsupported and irrational.

Why would an evolved brain care one bit about imaginary cubes?

Only a living consciousness would care about things like that.

 

[untermensche]

Like I wrote, you can believe with confidence you can command anything after it's been done. When you will your arm up you have to restrain it from already being up to actually have your act follow your 'command'.

I know I can move my arm BEFORE I move it.

And I can plan a certain way to move it and carry out that plan.

Nothing unique can arise from a reflex.

No new idea can arise from a reflex.

A reflex can only give you what it has given you already before.

 

[bilby]

The brain is what allows me to switch my view at will.

To say the brain is doing it on it's own is unsupported and irrational.

Why would an evolved brain care one bit about imaginary cubes?

Only a living consciousness would care about things like that.

That's one of the stupidest things I have ever seen anyone say.

And I have read a lot of your posts, and really didn't expect to see some of them beaten for that title.

What, apart from your brain, could possibly be involved? To suggest that there is something else involved is unsupported and irrational.

Your brain is excellent at getting things badly wrong, and this is easy to demonstrate with simple optical illusions (amongst other tests). And yet, when the ONLY evidence you have for 'something else' is that it feels right; and there is a MOUNTAIN of evidence that 'something else' is a physical impossibility, you decide to believe your lying brain. WHY??

The entire scientific method exists solely because we know how easy humans are to fool, and how easily people fool themselves into believing things that are untrue. And yet you insist that you are immune to that failing, and can rely on your personal experiences as being more compelling than hard evidence.

Would you like to buy a bridge?

 

[DBT]

The brain is what allows me to switch my view at will.

To say the brain is doing it on it's own is unsupported and irrational.

Why would an evolved brain care one bit about imaginary cubes?

Only a living consciousness would care about things like that.

You are still persisting with your Homunculus fallacy. You don't even exist unless the brain is generating conscious activity with you, self awareness, as a feature and a function of that activity. You, being a construct of the brain can do no more and no less than what the brain is capable of and enables while consciousness is active.

 

[untermensche]

The brain is what allows me to switch my view at will.

To say the brain is doing it on it's own is unsupported and irrational.

Why would an evolved brain care one bit about imaginary cubes?

Only a living consciousness would care about things like that.

You are still persisting with your Homunculus fallacy. You don't even exist unless the brain is generating conscious activity with you, self awareness, as a feature and a function of that activity. You, being a construct of the brain can do no more and no less than what the brain is capable of and enables while consciousness is active.

You are still persisting in YOUR Homunculus fallacy.

No Homunculus exists.

An active consciousness that knows the world and can act on it does.

And all you have are your prejudices in the face of it. Not a refutation based on any actual evidence.

 

[untermensche]

The brain is what allows me to switch my view at will.

To say the brain is doing it on it's own is unsupported and irrational.

Why would an evolved brain care one bit about imaginary cubes?

Only a living consciousness would care about things like that.

That's one of the stupidest things I have ever seen anyone say.

And I have read a lot of your posts, and really didn't expect to see some of them beaten for that title.

What, apart from your brain, could possibly be involved? To suggest that there is something else involved is unsupported and irrational.

Your brain is excellent at getting things badly wrong, and this is easy to demonstrate with simple optical illusions (amongst other tests). And yet, when the ONLY evidence you have for 'something else' is that it feels right; and there is a MOUNTAIN of evidence that 'something else' is a physical impossibility, you decide to believe your lying brain. WHY??

The entire scientific method exists solely because we know how easy humans are to fool, and how easily people fool themselves into believing things that are untrue. And yet you insist that you are immune to that failing, and can rely on your personal experiences as being more compelling than hard evidence.

Would you like to buy a bridge?

Yes. The questions are so simple you can't even begin to address them.

You are once again deluded and lost.

Good luck puppy.

What it must be like for a living person with a will to reduce oneself to a reflex?

The absolute height of ignorance.

 

[DBT]

You are still persisting with your Homunculus fallacy. You don't even exist unless the brain is generating conscious activity with you, self awareness, as a feature and a function of that activity. You, being a construct of the brain can do no more and no less than what the brain is capable of and enables while consciousness is active.

You are still persisting in YOUR Homunculus fallacy.

No Homunculus exists.

An active consciousness that knows the world and can act on it does.

And all you have are your prejudices in the face of it. Not a refutation based on any actual evidence.

You persistently and strenuously argue for the existence of an Homunculus even while denying that you are arguing for such a thing. Good one.

 

[untermensche]

You are still persisting in YOUR Homunculus fallacy.

No Homunculus exists.

An active consciousness that knows the world and can act on it does.

And all you have are your prejudices in the face of it. Not a refutation based on any actual evidence.

You persistently and strenuously argue for the existence of an Homunculus even while denying that you are arguing for such a thing. Good one.

You may think you can reduce this "thing" inside the human that allows it to make decisions and to act in the world to some strawman concept that has nothing to do with the situation.

But your foolishness is not persuasive.

We know for a fact that thoughts appear to consciousness.

We do not have any reason to think the brain is somehow aware of them as well. The brain merely makes them. It makes them for something else made by the brain capable of being aware of them.

The brain does not create thoughts for itself.

It creates them for a consciousness.

 

[fromderinside]

Oh goody daddie untremenche found Matryoshka in the brain.

 

[untermensche]

Yes it is more complex than your absurd notions that don't explain anything, predict anything of value, correlate to actual experience, or possibly produce anything as commonplace as a unique expression or new idea.

 

[DBT]

Mind/brain/consciousness is indeed more complex than any of us can possibly describe. However, it is nothing like you describe in terms of autonomy. Your belief puts your position firmly in the realm of eccentric ideas and beliefs, Deepak Choptra territory for sure. Faith rather than evidence based reason.

 

[untermensche]

Mind/brain/consciousness is indeed more complex than any of us can possibly describe. However, it is nothing like you describe in terms of autonomy. Your belief puts your position firmly in the realm of eccentric ideas and beliefs, Deepak Choptra territory for sure. Faith rather than evidence based reason.

There is no added problem in terms of autonomy in saying Einstein's brain constructed the Theory of Relativity or saying his consciousness did.

Since we have no clue how a brain could do something like that.

There is no added problem of autonomy in saying the brain moved the arm of it's own volition (whatever that is) or the mind moved it on it's own volition.

You don't have the slightest clue how the brain does anything or what motivates the brain to do anything.

You autonomy argument is really a very shitty worthless argument. But it is the last thread you cling to, so I must constantly be bored by your irrational insistence it means something.

When you show me what motivates the brain to do anything THEN you can begin to talk about autonomy.

 

[DBT]

My autonomy argument? You are the one making that claim. You stubbornly persist with that claim regardless of all evidence.

 

[untermensche]

My autonomy argument? You are the one making that claim. You stubbornly persist with that claim regardless of all evidence.

Your worthless autonomy argument.

It is all you have. That is why I have heard it about 50 times.

You have no idea how the brain initiates anything.

So your claims that consciousness can't possibly initiate action is hollow nonsense. Not worth the effort you make to say it. Over and over again.

 

[George S]

You have no idea how the brain initiates anything..

I do! Through motor neurons.

 

[untermensche]

You have no idea how the brain initiates anything..

I do! Through motor neurons.

But what initiates the signal to the motor neuron?

Does it act on it's own volition?

Why does a brain just randomly desire to lift the arm? For no functional reason. Just to do it. Not to stretch. Just to do it.

I can understand my desire to lift the arm, it is capricious and meaningless, but not the desires of a brain to do something so meaningless.

 

[Treedbear]

Mind/brain/consciousness is indeed more complex than any of us can possibly describe. However, it is nothing like you describe in terms of autonomy. Your belief puts your position firmly in the realm of eccentric ideas and beliefs, Deepak Choptra territory for sure. Faith rather than evidence based reason.

...
You don't have the slightest clue how the brain does anything or what motivates the brain to do anything.
...
When you show me what motivates the brain to do anything THEN you can begin to talk about autonomy.

Hi again. I haven't checked in on this thread for awhile. Truly amazing how committed you folks are to the topic. Perhaps you're zeroing in on the answer to the hard problem. My only contribution has to do with this issue of what motivates the brain. For me it must have something to do with how the human brain (and brains in general) evolved. They start out simply no doubt, such as the way box jellyfish are "motivated" toward or away from prey or predator. No brain per se, just neural connections. My theory is that as the brain became a centralized organ and evolved in size and complexity the main problem which arose was how to avoid the build up of excessive heat levels which can damage brain cells, just as with gates in semiconductor microprocessors. Gate density and processor speed is limited by how well the resulting heat is dissipated and how efficiently the various subsystems are connected. Size, complexity and functionality are limited by inefficiency. In the brain various processes have evolved in order to maintain the well being of the organism and viability of the species. Conflicts between different processes need to be resolved so as to limit energy expenditure and increase efficiency. At the most basic level this is what motivates all decisions the brain makes. And as an added bonus, I think this provides the basis for what we call feelings. At the visceral level it's the unique way we characterize situations and associations that produce levels of anxiety vs serenity.

 

[untermensche]

The evolved brain is the instrument that allows consciousness to make decisions based on ideas.

An idea is a form of potential brain energy.

 

[Treedbear]

The evolved brain is the instrument that allows consciousness to make decisions based on ideas.

An idea is a form of potential brain energy.

I don't know what you mean by potential brain energy. The energy in the brain comes from various intracellular metabolic processes. The brain creates models of the things it perceives in its environment. How it does that is only beginning to be understood. But the basic principles can be demonstrated on computers through genetic algorithms (*). Ideas are simply the name we give to adaptations to existing models which are meant to improve them. The brain creates ideas by comparing two or more existing models for similarities and finds reinforcing patterns, analogies, metaphors, paradigms, etc. Random or pseudorandom input is undoubtably an important input to the process. Just like in biological evolution. Ideas are the mutations to the models which are the species that populate the landscape of the mind.

I don't know how to determine whether it's consciousness that makes decisions or whether consciousness is only the awareness of decisions being made. It remains the hard problem for me. But it seems totally rational to imagine that the brain's neural networks have evolved to make sense of its environment so that it can control how the rest of the organism interacts with it. At some level it is the brain that makes the decisions.

* The genetic algorithm is a method for solving both constrained and unconstrained optimization problems that is based on natural selection, the process that drives biological evolution. The genetic algorithm repeatedly modifies a population of individual solutions. At each step, the genetic algorithm selects individuals at random from the current population to be parents and uses them to produce the children for the next generation. Over successive generations, the population "evolves" toward an optimal solution.

The difference between computers and brains is that the former are basically digital and sequential and therefore highly structured whereas the latter are basically analog and massively parallel and complex.