Consciousness

[rousseau]

Do you experience consciousness?
I, myself, am a biological robot.
What I feel is what it is like to be a biological robot.

Now we're talking.

I'm the same way. I don't have control over what I do anymore than what my abilities and wisdom allow for. Most of what I do is actually sub conscious. What passes as conscious thought is actually just when I need to exert effort to find a solution rather than it being automatic.

That said, I'm still me, I'm still unique. My emotions are still real and relevant. I still have aspirations. I still experience meaning. My existence still has meaning to others. The fact that I'm aware of exactly what I am and how I work just gives me a tremendous advantage.

 

[untermensche]

....All behavior is unconscious at the time of that behavior. (Libet, et al)...

No such thing has ever been demonstrated. That is an incredibly bad understanding of these preliminary findings that have never been explained in terms of neural physiology.

The person attends then moves. Some claim the attending is subconscious which is nonsense. You can't attend subconsciously.

When you willfully move your arm it is you willfully moving your arm.

There is no science that proves anything else.

 

[Juma]

....All behavior is unconscious at the time of that behavior. (Libet, et al)...

No such thing has ever been demonstrated. That is an incredibly bad understanding of these preliminary findings that have never been explained in terms of neural physiology.

The person attends then moves. Some claim the attending is subconscious which is nonsense. You can't attend subconsciously.

When you willfully move your arm it is you willfully moving your arm.

There is no science that proves anything else.

There is nothing that hinders subconcious attention.

 

[untermensche]

No such thing has ever been demonstrated. That is an incredibly bad understanding of these preliminary findings that have never been explained in terms of neural physiology.

The person attends then moves. Some claim the attending is subconscious which is nonsense. You can't attend subconsciously.

When you willfully move your arm it is you willfully moving your arm.

There is no science that proves anything else.

There is nothing that hinders subconcious attention.

What is doing the attending?

Give me an example.

 

[rousseau]

There is nothing that hinders subconcious attention.

What is doing the attending?

Give me an example.

If you're not familiar with automatic nervous systems, you should read up on them.

A great example is our neural mechanisms to react to extreme heat/cold. If you touch a hot stove element, we have neural pathways which will remove our hand from the element before we are aware of the movement. If this neural mechanism wasn't in place, to react with speed, we would be injured quite frequently.

In the same way, we have neural mechanisms to react quickly to verbal language, physical threats, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and on and on. Most of this behaviour is quite automatic, and springs from the natural flow of day to day life.

We only need to 'attend' to things when we don't innately know how to do them.

 

[Juma]

There is nothing that hinders subconcious attention.

What is doing the attending?

Give me an example.

The brain.

 

[DBT]

Not true. There is a verifiable link between the electrochemical activity of a brain and subject reports of what they are seeing, feeling and thinking in relation to activity in various regions of their brain...which can be electrically or chemically disrupted at any time.

There is a correlation.

Correlations do not demonstrate causation or explain how things work. There is a strong correlation between the radio and the song I'm hearing, but the radio is not the only thing involved.

You ignore evidence that demonstrates causation, just a few examples from the article I posted earlier:

''Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by functional MRI, electroencephalography and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain-scanning activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct, on a computer screen, what someone is seeing.
Thousands of experiments confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences.''

 

[DBT]

....All behavior is unconscious at the time of that behavior. (Libet, et al)...

No such thing has ever been demonstrated. That is an incredibly bad understanding of these preliminary findings that have never been explained in terms of neural physiology.

The person attends then moves. Some claim the attending is subconscious which is nonsense. You can't attend subconsciously.

When you willfully move your arm it is you willfully moving your arm.

There is no science that proves anything else.

You are wrong, information processing from input/stimuli must necessarily precede its conscious representation within the brains 'conscious workspace' - the very activity that is imaged by fMRI and reported as an experience of thought by the subject in response to questions asked by the researcher. Even at this early stage, predicting a decision made by unconscious processing before they become conscious to the subject is not only possible but being done. Planck Institute, etc.

 

[untermensche]

What is doing the attending?

Give me an example.

If you're not familiar with automatic nervous systems, you should read up on them.

A great example is our neural mechanisms to react to extreme heat/cold. If you touch a hot stove element, we have neural pathways which will remove our hand from the element before we are aware of the movement. If this neural mechanism wasn't in place, to react with speed, we would be injured quite frequently.

In the same way, we have neural mechanisms to react quickly to verbal language, physical threats, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and on and on. Most of this behaviour is quite automatic, and springs from the natural flow of day to day life.

We only need to 'attend' to things when we don't innately know how to do them.

A reflex is reaction, not attending.

A ball bouncing off the floor is not attending.

You are making a circular argument. You are claiming a reflex is equivalent to conscious attending merely to pretend consciousness is a reflex.

 

[untermensche]

There is a correlation.

Correlations do not demonstrate causation or explain how things work. There is a strong correlation between the radio and the song I'm hearing, but the radio is not the only thing involved.

You ignore evidence that demonstrates causation, just a few examples from the article I posted earlier:

''Damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe, for example, causes face blindness, and stimulation of this same area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Stroke-caused damage to the visual cortex region called V1 leads to loss of conscious visual perception. Changes in conscious experience can be directly measured by functional MRI, electroencephalography and single-neuron recordings. Neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain-scanning activity before the subject is even consciously aware of the decisions made. Using brain scans alone, neuroscientists have even been able to reconstruct, on a computer screen, what someone is seeing.
Thousands of experiments confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences.''

This is rehashing an earlier thread where I explained this to you about 20 times.

None of this demonstrates causation of consciousness any more than damage to a radio implies damage to the radio signal.

Nothing can be said to cause consciousness until what consciousness actually is is understood.

 

[untermensche]

No such thing has ever been demonstrated. That is an incredibly bad understanding of these preliminary findings that have never been explained in terms of neural physiology.

The person attends then moves. Some claim the attending is subconscious which is nonsense. You can't attend subconsciously.

When you willfully move your arm it is you willfully moving your arm.

There is no science that proves anything else.

You are wrong, information processing from input/stimuli must necessarily precede its conscious representation within the brains 'conscious workspace' - the very activity that is imaged by fMRI and reported as an experience of thought by the subject in response to questions asked by the researcher. Even at this early stage, predicting a decision made by unconscious processing before they become conscious to the subject is not only possible but being done. Planck Institute, etc.

You are merely drawing conclusions that fit your preconceptions.

The conclusions of these, reaction studies, not willful movement studies, are extremely preliminary.

Nobody argues that the brain prepares for movement before movement occurs, but consciousness can stop the movement even after the brain has allegedly "decided" to make it.

 

[DBT]

You are wrong, information processing from input/stimuli must necessarily precede its conscious representation within the brains 'conscious workspace' - the very activity that is imaged by fMRI and reported as an experience of thought by the subject in response to questions asked by the researcher. Even at this early stage, predicting a decision made by unconscious processing before they become conscious to the subject is not only possible but being done. Planck Institute, etc.

You are merely drawing conclusions that fit your preconceptions.

No, I'd say that it's you who refuse to consider evidence that the researchers themselves consider to be evidence for brain agency. For which I have provided citations stating just that and the reasons why researchers overwhelmingly accept brain agency. Except people like Deepak Choptra, of course, who disregard evidence in order to maintain their own beliefs. As do you,

Nobody argues that the brain prepares for movement before movement occurs, but consciousness can stop the movement even after the brain has allegedly "decided" to make it.

That just show that you don't understand the research or the cognitive activity through time and change. To say that ''consciousness can stop the movement'' implies an independent agency that is not subject to physical processes, yet is able override them.

There is no evidence for your idea.

Veto, aka, Libet, follows the same rules and is subject to the same processes as the decision it overrides. New information is constantly altering and modifying the thought a decision making process, so when information feeds into the system informing conscious activity that this decision is bad for x reason, a veto has occurred as a part of the flow of information in both unconscious and conscious forms.

 

[untermensche]

You are merely drawing conclusions that fit your preconceptions.

No, I'd say that it's you who refuse to consider evidence that the researchers themselves consider to be evidence for brain agency. For which I have provided citations stating just that and the reasons why researchers overwhelmingly accept brain agency. Except people like Deepak Choptra, of course, who disregard evidence in order to maintain their own beliefs. As do you,

Nobody argues that the brain prepares for movement before movement occurs, but consciousness can stop the movement even after the brain has allegedly "decided" to make it.

That just show that you don't understand the research or the cognitive activity through time and change. To say that ''consciousness can stop the movement'' implies an independent agency that is not subject to physical processes, yet is able override them.

There is no evidence for your idea.

Veto, aka, Libet, follows the same rules and is subject to the same processes as the decision it overrides. New information is constantly altering and modifying the thought a decision making process, so when information feeds into the system informing conscious activity that this decision is bad for x reason, a veto has occurred as a part of the flow of information in both unconscious and conscious forms.

None of this research increases our understanding of consciousness. They muddy our understanding. They make us understand consciousness less.

None of this research explains what consciousness is in the least.

What they mainly show is people move stereotypically and preparation for movement occurs before movement occurs. Not much more.

And consciousness IS an independent entity. Nothing is forcing me to express these ideas.

But in all these studies subjects are forced to move, by design. Subjects are responding to external demands, not making free decisions.

These studies do not explain free willful movement in the least. They do not even examine it.

 

[DBT]

No, I'd say that it's you who refuse to consider evidence that the researchers themselves consider to be evidence for brain agency. For which I have provided citations stating just that and the reasons why researchers overwhelmingly accept brain agency. Except people like Deepak Choptra, of course, who disregard evidence in order to maintain their own beliefs. As do you,

Nobody argues that the brain prepares for movement before movement occurs, but consciousness can stop the movement even after the brain has allegedly "decided" to make it.

That just show that you don't understand the research or the cognitive activity through time and change. To say that ''consciousness can stop the movement'' implies an independent agency that is not subject to physical processes, yet is able override them.

There is no evidence for your idea.

Veto, aka, Libet, follows the same rules and is subject to the same processes as the decision it overrides. New information is constantly altering and modifying the thought a decision making process, so when information feeds into the system informing conscious activity that this decision is bad for x reason, a veto has occurred as a part of the flow of information in both unconscious and conscious forms.

None of this research increases our understanding of consciousness. They muddy our understanding. They make us understand consciousness less.

None of this research explains what consciousness is in the least.

What they mainly show is people move stereotypically and preparation for movement occurs before movement occurs. Not much more.

And consciousness IS an independent entity. Nothing is forcing me to express these ideas.

But in all these studies subjects are forced to move, by design. Subjects are responding to external demands, not making free decisions.

These studies do not explain free willful movement in the least. They do not even examine it.

Whatever, you say one thing but the research, the researchers and the evidence coming out of the research says something else entirely; that a non physical, autonomous component of consciousness which supposedly overrules decisions made by the brain is not only not needed to explain brain agency but has no supporting evidence whatsoever.

If you choose to believe in some magical non physical element be it autonomous consciousness, soul or Atman or whatever, that's your own business.

These studies do not explain free willful movement in the least.

Saying that shows that you aren't familiar with the research. Will-full movements can be generated by electrical brain stimulation where the subject performs an action and the brain's narrator function explains the reason for the action as a conscious choice - 'I was looking for my shoes''

Emotions and feeling can be invoked with their related thoughts and decisions, love, hate, frustration, pleasure, ecstasy, etc.

 

[untermensche]

From last year:

The point of no return

In early 2016, PNAS published a paper by researchers in Berlin, Germany, The point of no return in vetoing self-initiated movements, in which the authors set out to investigate whether human subjects had the ability to veto an action (in this study, a movement of the foot) after the detection of its Bereitschaftspotential (BP).[59] The Bereitschaftspotential, which was discovered by Kornhuber & Deecke in 1965,[28] is an instance of unconscious electrical activity within the motor cortex, quantified by the use of EEG, that occurs moments before a motion is performed by a person: it is considered a signal that the brain is "getting ready" to perform the motion. The study found evidence that these actions can be vetoed even after the BP is detected (i. e. after it can be seen that the brain has started preparing for the action). The researchers maintain this is evidence for the existence of at least some degree of free will in humans:[60] previously, it had been argued[61] that, given the unconscious nature of the BP and its usefulness in predicting a person's movement, these are movements that are initiated by the brain without the involvement of the conscious will of the person.[62][63] The study showed that subjects were able to "override" these signals and stop short of performing the movement that was being anticipated by the BP. Furthermore, researchers identified what was termed a "point of no return": once the BP is detected for a movement, the person could refrain from performing the movement only if they attempted to cancel it 200 milliseconds or longer before the onset of the movement. After this point, the person was unable to avoid performing the movement. Previously, Kornhuber & Deecke underlined that absence of conscious will during the early Bereitschaftspotential (termed BP1) is not a proof of the non-existence of free will, as also unconscious agendas may be free and non-deterministic. According to their suggestion, man has relative freedom, i.e. freedom in degrees, that can be in- or decreased through deliberate choices that involve both conscious and unconscious (panencephalic) processes.[64]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will

Nothing about any of this research conclusively proves humans cannot freely move using their "will".

The research is actually a tangled morass that demonstrates next to nothing. A bunch of artificial forced situations that rely on subjective reporting of when people guess they are "initiating" willful movement. When the fact is, when awake the "will" does not dis-initiate.

It is preliminary and many of the conclusions are wild and unsupported.

And I repeat the most salient fact. None of it explains ONE thing about what consciousness is.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

If you're not familiar with automatic nervous systems, you should read up on them.

A great example is our neural mechanisms to react to extreme heat/cold. If you touch a hot stove element, we have neural pathways which will remove our hand from the element before we are aware of the movement. If this neural mechanism wasn't in place, to react with speed, we would be injured quite frequently.

In the same way, we have neural mechanisms to react quickly to verbal language, physical threats, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and on and on. Most of this behaviour is quite automatic, and springs from the natural flow of day to day life.

We only need to 'attend' to things when we don't innately know how to do them.

A reflex is reaction, not attending.

A ball bouncing off the floor is not attending.

You are making a circular argument. You are claiming a reflex is equivalent to conscious attending merely to pretend consciousness is a reflex.

That's funny.

How does your consciousness work? Does it control me or do I control it?

 

[DBT]

Nothing about any of this research conclusively proves humans cannot freely move using their "will".

Nobody is arguing otherwise... the issue being the question of how 'will' is prepared and formed, how self awareness is prepared and formed and how action is prepared, formed and carried out.

None of this appears to happen through some sort of non material magical 'consciousness' or 'self' - which is what you are essentially arguing for; ''we don't know x therefore y''

That is your fallacy.

 

[untermensche]

That's funny.

How does your consciousness work? Does it control me or do I control it?

Lift your right arm over your head.

You have just used your consciousness to move your arm.

You used your consciousness to form and type out your questions.

 

[untermensche]

Nothing about any of this research conclusively proves humans cannot freely move using their "will".

Nobody is arguing otherwise... the issue being the question of how 'will' is prepared and formed, how self awareness is prepared and formed and how action is prepared, formed and carried out.

None of this appears to happen through some sort of non material magical 'consciousness' or 'self' - which is what you are essentially arguing for; ''we don't know x therefore y''

That is your fallacy.

You don't know any "Hows".

You know a few "wheres". You know (extremely grossly) where there is increased activity but you have no idea how this increased activity occurs or how it relates to all the other brain activity going on that didn't increase.

 

[DBT]

Nobody is arguing otherwise... the issue being the question of how 'will' is prepared and formed, how self awareness is prepared and formed and how action is prepared, formed and carried out.

None of this appears to happen through some sort of non material magical 'consciousness' or 'self' - which is what you are essentially arguing for; ''we don't know x therefore y''

That is your fallacy.

You don't know any "Hows".

Not true. How alcohol effect the system is broadly understood and experienced by anyone who has indulged. I've already listed brain stimulation of feeling, emotions, actions, relationships to neuronal structures, amygdala, etc, Chemical and structural changes and so on. This being the relationship between the structures of the brain and the roles they play in terms of behaviour.

You know a few "wheres". You know (extremely grossly) where there is increased activity but you have no idea how this increased activity occurs or how it relates to all the other brain activity going on that didn't increase.

Not true. Brain stimulation and cases of pathology have provided information on the relationship between brain structures and the roles they play;

Broadly speaking:

perceptual processing
• Superior colliculus

Modulation of cognition
(memory, attention)
• Cingulate cortex
• Hippocampus
• Basal forebrain

Representation of
emotional response
• Somatosensory-related
cortices

Representation of
perceived action
• Left frontal operculum
• Superior temporal gyrus

Motivational evaluation
• Amygdala
• Orbitofrontal cortex

Social reasoning
• Prefrontal cortex


Put together, the evidence for brain agency amounts to far, far more than your own argument; ''we don't know x therefore y''

Essentially being -'We don't know how the brain forms mental imagery and sensation, therefore magic''


We don't know how the brain forms mental imagery and sensation, but based on the given evidence, it is clear that it does, that the brain is the agency of consciousness.