Consciousness

[fromderinside]

Put an O'scope connection at the output of a radio output tube instead of an amplifier and speaker is my analogy of what you are so messed up about. You put the wrong interface so you can still believe what the brain does is not meaningful to us. Instead of hearing intelligible words you see wavy lines on a screen.

It''s all in the transducer untermenche, it's all in the transducer. Better yet, consider auditory cortex as your transducer and your voice as your speaker - your subvocal muscular activity if you want things to remain mysterious - and it becomes clear what the brain has done.

But, hey here's just another little bit of analysis for you to overcome with your beliefs.

Go to it.

The brain definitely makes things that consciousness is aware of.

But there is no evidence the brain itself is aware of thoughts.

The only evidence is that consciousness is aware of them.

If the brain itself is not aware of thoughts and only consciousness is aware of them then only consciousness could possibly act on them.

The brain gathers information that the brain uses to provide judgments for viewing and saying. The brain initiates the sounds that are articulated by the vocal system then modifies what is said in line with new information coming in from outside or in the brain itself, then the brain composes the imagery for one to see then modifies it after it directs vision to shift the gaze providing another view. The brain makes the decision for which you give conscious credit although consciousness has no mechanism. As I said if you provided speakers you'd hear the brain thinking and what it was considering among it's instances. When you listen to one speak you are hearing what the brain has composed and when you see you see that to which the brain has directed you to look and has generated for you to say.

The evidence the brain is aware of thoughts is that the brain guides the body to correspond to the wishes and directions of those thoughts.

The conscious you make up is a thing based on sub-articulation commanded by language centers directing vocal activity and ongoing scenery processing and it is a toy, a thing of the past since actions thought by consciousness have already taken place. The brain knows that the hand has been raised since it stop directing it to rise when has risen.

 

[DBT]

Magic then? Pure comedy more like it.

Magic or consciousness itself can influence the brain.

That would be done with some form of energy.

Not magic.

Consciousness has no independence from the brain, It is the brain that is forming consciousness as it is being experienced. It would take magic for consciousness to gain independence over the the very mechanism that's forming and shaping the experience of sight, sound, thoughts, etc.

You do realize that magic is just stage illusions and not something magical like the tv series, I dream of Jeannie?

 

[untermensche]

Magic or consciousness itself can influence the brain.

That would be done with some form of energy.

Not magic.

Consciousness has no independence from the brain, It is the brain that is forming consciousness as it is being experienced. It would take magic for consciousness to gain independence over the the very mechanism that's forming and shaping the experience of sight, sound, thoughts, etc.

You do realize that magic is just stage illusions and not something magical like the tv series, I dream of Jeannie?

Yes.

If consciousness had independence from the brain it could not influence it.

But as you say it does not.

 

[George S]

Consciousness has no independence from the brain, It is the brain that is forming consciousness as it is being experienced. It would take magic for consciousness to gain independence over the the very mechanism that's forming and shaping the experience of sight, sound, thoughts, etc.

You do realize that magic is just stage illusions and not something magical like the tv series, I dream of Jeannie?

Yes.

If consciousness had independence from the brain it could not influence it.

But as you say it does not.

Where does this consciousness go when the brain stops working? The same place a flame goes when it is extinguished?
Consciousness is what it is like to be a conscious human. Is it an emergent property of the brain, generated by that brain? What else?

 

[fromderinside]

Consciousness is a very limited affect of brain work. It is formed primarily by visual, somesthetic, olfactory, and emotive modeling, and subvocalization brain product providing a space for social decision making which is used as basis for communicating with others. Consciousness is no more than a here and now arena upon which social drama is worked out. This becomes obvious when the brain connects to some sense during sleep producing strange experiential dreams from ongoing brain memory fixing and repair work.

This garbage about emergent needs to end. It is only emergent because we don't completely understand substrates. However it is obvious from what we do know that it is derivative rather than emergent. Information is no more emergent from entropic activity than is consciousness emergent from brain activity. They are causally determined in that the physical is always the deterministic producer of the virtual.

 

[untermensche]

Yes.

If consciousness had independence from the brain it could not influence it.

But as you say it does not.

Where does this consciousness go when the brain stops working? The same place a flame goes when it is extinguished?
Consciousness is what it is like to be a conscious human. Is it an emergent property of the brain, generated by that brain? What else?

The issue is whether consciousness with it's ideas and beliefs can force the brain to act on them.

- - - Updated - - -

Consciousness is a very limited affect of brain work. It is formed primarily by visual, somesthetic, olfactory, and emotive modeling, and subvocalization brain product providing a space for social decision making which is used as basis for communicating with others. Consciousness is no more than a here and now arena upon which social drama is worked out. This becomes obvious when the brain connects to some sense during sleep producing strange experiential dreams from ongoing brain memory fixing and repair work.

This garbage about emergent needs to end. It is only emergent because we don't completely understand substrates. However it is obvious from what we do know that it is derivative rather than emergent. Information is no more emergent from entropic activity than is consciousness emergent from brain activity. They are causally determined in that the physical is always the deterministic producer of the virtual.

That is the smallest part of a thinking and directing consciousness.

What you're doing here is it's largest part.

You are not exhibiting reflex. You are expressing beliefs.

 

[fromderinside]

Consciousness is a very limited affect of brain work. It is formed primarily by visual, somesthetic, olfactory, and emotive modeling, and subvocalization brain product providing a space for social decision making which is used as basis for communicating with others. Consciousness is no more than a here and now arena upon which social drama is worked out. This becomes obvious when the brain connects to some sense during sleep producing strange experiential dreams from ongoing brain memory fixing and repair work.

This garbage about emergent needs to end. It is only emergent because we don't completely understand substrates. However it is obvious from what we do know that it is derivative rather than emergent. Information is no more emergent from entropic activity than is consciousness emergent from brain activity. They are causally determined in that the physical is always the deterministic producer of the virtual.

You are not exhibiting reflex. You are expressing beliefs.

There are and have been presented on these consciousness threads many scientific studies, experiments, demonstrating every point I made above. Science is never fact. It is verified hypothesis piled upon verified hypothesis constructing a thread of understanding often summarized as I just did. Calling them beliefs exposes your failures understanding scientific endeavor serving no other purpose than to gratify your exaggerated ego. Equations may even be forth coming in what is left of my life.

 

[DBT]

Consciousness has no independence from the brain, It is the brain that is forming consciousness as it is being experienced. It would take magic for consciousness to gain independence over the the very mechanism that's forming and shaping the experience of sight, sound, thoughts, etc.

You do realize that magic is just stage illusions and not something magical like the tv series, I dream of Jeannie?

Yes.

If consciousness had independence from the brain it could not influence it.

But as you say it does not.

That makes no sense. You need to explain your model better than you've done to date, which is not at all.

How can consciousness that has no independence from the brain, having no autonomy, influence the brain....the brain being the very thing forming and shaping conscious experience based on sensory input feed and memory?

Can you explain that?

 

[untermensche]

Yes.

If consciousness had independence from the brain it could not influence it.

But as you say it does not.

That makes no sense. You need to explain your model better than you've done to date, which is not at all.

How can consciousness that has no independence from the brain, having no autonomy, influence the brain....the brain being the very thing forming and shaping conscious experience based on sensory input feed and memory?

Can you explain that?

It makes perfect sense.

The brain has an effect that is able to have a feedback effect on the brain.

 

[Treedbear]

That makes no sense. You need to explain your model better than you've done to date, which is not at all.

How can consciousness that has no independence from the brain, having no autonomy, influence the brain....the brain being the very thing forming and shaping conscious experience based on sensory input feed and memory?

Can you explain that?

It makes perfect sense.

The brain has an effect that is able to have a feedback effect on the brain.

I can agree with that. But I have already offered a simple mechanism for how that works. To repeat, the brain creates models of its environment. As the brain is aware of the body which it is in, it incorporates those inputs into a model of the self. A very intricate and intimate model that is unique in this way. Various models interact within the brain to create conflict or resolve into harmony. Harmony is the more efficient state and is thus a driver of how the brain functions. The model of the self is modified in the same way, and in the same way provides feedback for the other models in a dynamic equilibrium. That seems to be how it works. Every model has a degree of autonomy and every model is dependent. But no model can be said to control the other models or processes, it merely influences them as feedback. It's something that a computer could be set up to do. You'd simply need to program an object which was defined by variables reflecting the status of the computer in terms of activity levels (or bandwidth usage) along with perhaps sensors for various physical inputs and outputs. But it still doesn't completely explain subjective consciousness.

 

[untermensche]

It makes perfect sense.

The brain has an effect that is able to have a feedback effect on the brain.

I can agree with that. But I have already offered a simple mechanism for how that works. To repeat, the brain creates models of its environment. As the brain is aware of the body which it is in, it incorporates those inputs into a model of the self. A very intricate and intimate model that is unique in this way. Various models interact within the brain to create conflict or resolve into harmony. Harmony is the more efficient state and is thus a driver of how the brain functions. The model of the self is modified in the same way, and in the same way provides feedback for the other models in a dynamic equilibrium. That seems to be how it works. Every model has a degree of autonomy and every model is dependent. But no model can be said to control the other models or processes, it merely influences them as feedback. It's something that a computer could be set up to do. You'd simply need to program an object which was defined by variables reflecting the status of the computer in terms of activity levels (or bandwidth usage) along with perhaps sensors for various physical inputs and outputs. But it still doesn't completely explain subjective consciousness.

My guess is if you can model how the activity of cells results in conscious experience you will be on your way to explaining how consciousness has a feedback effect on the brain.

 

[fromderinside]

Early on I studied the locus of learning only to find that every sensory input, at every stage of that input provided feedback to more remote processes as well as passed incoming information up to more complex processing systems in the brain. That fact keeps us from fining a source of learning since every process is continuously influencing processes more central and more peripheral that where we choose to record. Learning, sensing, effecting, is being modified by local information both above and below the site wath which we choose to record.

For sensing that means each added input modified following inputs as well as getting passed up to more central processes which are, in turn, modified by both their output and inputs. One way to look at this is sense is to say the neural systems is continuously tuning itself to be more responsive to what it just received and it is passing that information up and down the sensing system.

Some have proposed a sort of a neural holographic system fairly spread in time capturing appropriate moments of sensation as early as 1960. Others have proposed auto-correlation passing up from one sense organ and cross correlation between the complementing sense organ which accounts for a lot in both visual and acoustic perception again dating to the 1950s.

This lack of independence between obvious processing structures makes it difficult to point to a locus of this or that capability without removing the fact that there are general loci which can be identified given temporal averaging or estimating constraints.

So rather than saying we know nothing we know quite about, with constraints about time and place of activity, the functions performed in regions loosely associated with structures in the brain.

Again I point out the brain forms content, carries out processes to express content, and employs processes to execute content which are the stuff of consciousness. All conscious can be then is the expressed content which the brain appreciates, carries back to other processes, modifying them in accordance with subsequent information to provide a fairly robust mechanism and stream of consciousness across all sense and response modes including emotional ones. The fact that we, as humans, maintain dialog and scene concordance is nothing more than the brain working, driving execution of behavior.

In summary the commander and chief you propose is a epiphenomenal vestige of what is being behaved.

 

[DBT]

That makes no sense. You need to explain your model better than you've done to date, which is not at all.

How can consciousness that has no independence from the brain, having no autonomy, influence the brain....the brain being the very thing forming and shaping conscious experience based on sensory input feed and memory?

Can you explain that?

It makes perfect sense.

The brain has an effect that is able to have a feedback effect on the brain.

Most of the brains activity is unconscious. You ignore the sequence of events leading up to conscious representation, consciousness coming after inputs, after propagation of information, after processing, etc, then conscious representation which is constantly being 'fed' information from the process of inputs into the flow of conscious experience.

It is not consciousness itself that alters the brain but inputs that alter conscious experience, inputs acquired prior to conscious perception of input information. Consciousness is what the brain is forming on the basis of input, processing, etc.

That's why your claim of consciousness itself being the decision maker is wrong. The brain is the decision maker and the agent of consciousness formation. There are many feedback loops, but consciousness itself does not make decisions.

The Unconscious Mind
''The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as the shadow of a “real” conscious mind, though there now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its counterpart. This “conscious-centric” bias is due in part to the operational definition within cognitive psychology that equates unconscious with subliminal. We review the evidence challenging this restricted view of the unconscious emerging from contemporary social cognition research, which has traditionally defined the unconscious in terms of its unintentional nature; this research has demonstrated the existence of several independent unconscious behavioral guidance systems: perceptual, evaluative, and motivational. From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind—that action precedes reflection.''

 

[untermensche]

It makes perfect sense.

The brain has an effect that is able to have a feedback effect on the brain.

Most of the brains activity is unconscious.

Which means you have no subject to explain anything about it to you and therefore do not understand it in the least.

You also cannot distinguish in any way which specific activity is available to consciousness and which is not.

You ignore the sequence of events leading up to conscious representation, consciousness coming after inputs, after propagation of information, after processing, etc, then conscious representation which is constantly being 'fed' information from the process of inputs into the flow of conscious experience.

This is desperate.

I have ignored nothing.

The brain takes stimulation and makes representations for consciousness.

The brain is the mindless slave of consciousness.

It is not consciousness itself that alters the brain but inputs that alter conscious experience

When the mind orders the brain to move the arm it most certainly alters it.

Consciousness is what the brain is forming on the basis of input, processing, etc.

And consciousness stimulating the brain is called feedback.

 

[DBT]

Most of the brains activity is unconscious.

Which means you have no subject to explain anything about it to you and therefore do not understand it in the least.

That being your mantra....meanwhile offering your own 'wisdom' which contradicts research, analysis and what researchers are saying. Never seeing the irony of your untenable position.

This is desperate.

That remark is your standard desperate response whenever you are challenged

I have ignored nothing.

You ignore evidence that falsifies your belief. You ignore experiments that show you are wrong. You ignore researchers that say the opposite to you....including anyone and everyone who happens to point this out.

You pretty much ignore everything that goes against your beliefs.

The brain takes stimulation and makes representations for consciousness.

The brain is the mindless slave of consciousness.

That makes no sense. None whatsoever.

When the mind orders the brain to move the arm it most certainly alters it.

The brain is generating both mind and related motor actions. Mind does nothing the brain is not doing during mind generating activity.

That is what you habitually ignore.

And consciousness stimulating the brain is called feedback.

Consciousness is a brain activity. Whatever consciousness is doing, the brain is generating.

 

[untermensche]

And consciousness stimulating the brain is called feedback.

Consciousness is a brain activity. Whatever consciousness is doing, the brain is generating.

You clearly have a little problem with the concept of "feedback".

The brain is generating consciousness.

Once generated consciousness is a thing separate from the brain, like the display on the computer screen is separate from all the calculations that went into creating it.

As an entity unto itself, and a thing generated by energy in some way, there is no reason to think it can't have a feedback mechanism back onto the brain.

But these are hard problems.

Much harder than timing human guesses which is about as easy as it gets and as worthless as it gets.

 

[DBT]

Consciousness is a brain activity. Whatever consciousness is doing, the brain is generating.

You clearly have a little problem with the concept of "feedback".

Consciousness is based on information feed. For example, where do you think the information for sensory experience comes from, sight, sound, touch, smell? From consciousness? Come on!

Once generated consciousness is a thing separate from the brain, like the display on the computer screen is separate from all the calculations that went into creating it.

Where do get this horse shit from. It's not even logical. Your ''Once generated consciousness is a thing separate from the brain'' is absurd because no brain activity can be said to be separate from the brain and its activity. It's sort of like claiming once your arm is moving the movement is separate from your moving arm.

As an entity unto itself, and a thing generated by energy in some way, there is no reason to think it can't have a feedback mechanism back onto the brain.

Oh, sure, sure, you just repeat this mantra a thousand times, that consciousness is an entity unto itself, over and over....never mind the fact of how consciousness is formed and expressed is a matter of information feed and connectivity.

A momentary failure of connectivity being expressed consciously as the inability to remember a name, where you left your keys, etc, only to recall once the underlying connection is established....so it's hardly ''an entity unto itself'' In fact, not at all an independent entity.

 

[untermensche]

You clearly have a little problem with the concept of "feedback".

Consciousness is based on information feed.

It is created by manipulating energy, in some way. It is a physical, not spiritual, phenomena.

It is composed of energy. Not information.

Once generated consciousness is a thing separate from the brain, like the display on the computer screen is separate from all the calculations that went into creating it.

Where do get this horse shit from. It's not even logical. Your ''Once generated consciousness is a thing separate from the brain'' is absurd because no brain activity can be said to be separate from the brain and its activity. It's sort of like claiming once your arm is moving the movement is separate from your moving arm.

Where you get this from is by thinking.

Consciousness is not brain activity.

It is something that arises out of brain activity, as a result of brain activity.

Brain activity is one phenomena and consciousness an entirely different phenomena.

Like light energy is one phenomena and the color blue is another.

 

[fromderinside]

Consciousness is not brain activity.

It is something that arises out of brain activity, as a result of brain activity.

Brain activity is one phenomena and consciousness an entirely different phenomena.

Like light energy is one phenomena and the color blue is another.

...and your citations are......chirp ............. chirp........... sigh....... thought so.

 

[untermensche]

Consciousness is not brain activity.

It is something that arises out of brain activity, as a result of brain activity.

Brain activity is one phenomena and consciousness an entirely different phenomena.

Like light energy is one phenomena and the color blue is another.

...and your citations are......chirp ............. chirp........... sigh....... thought so.

What do you specifically need a reference to understand?

The claim is that the product of some activity is not the name thing as the activity.

It is a philosophical point.