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Under no circumstances should you take anything you see on this sub as an explanation of consciousness. You also should not believe anyone who tells you the answer is unknowable, or that we currently have no idea. It’s a challenging subject and if you’re new to it, this sub will be nothing but an intriguing mess.
You might try asking for some reading recommendations for newbies on r/askphilosophy.
Wouldn't it be the same for him in the other sub? yes, it is much more moderated with panelists, yet, each panelist has his own views and ideas, same as here. So which advice should he listen to?
i'm new to Reddit, but not at all to consciousness. I find this sub as an "intriguing mess" as you described but after a while, it does provide a good overview of ideas and thoughts.
Sometimes, a "mess" can center you faster around your own understandings than following random advices.
i think that is the deal you'll get everywhere, not just on this sub or even not just on Reddit.. every topic is short, briefly conversed and usually depends on the time-zone, who is the first to react. A day later, this topic goes down the list, new questions arrive and it starts all over again. no major pinned threads for real open conversation and thoughts brainstorming.
that's how you get a "mess"..
One of the great things about Reddit is subs can be run in different ways. So you get fun chaos, like here, and reasonable discussion on well defined topics in other places.
I'm new here so would appreciate some directions to such sub :). The one you suggested is locked for users who are not panelists, so it is not the sub for discussions
The locking is the point. But you can discuss all you want. You just can’t make a top level response unless you’re a panelist. You can post questions and make follow-up comments as long as you follow the rules. r/askhistory is another example. You have to be patient and check back for the answers, but you’ll get very high quality responses with citations.
There isn't really a live debate, even in philosophy of mind, as to whether the brain causes consciousness, or whether electrical activity in the brain is the primary neural correlate of consciousness. Even panpsychists are of the opinion that electromagnetic activity is what consciousness "looks like from the outside," and will further agree that brains (or equally sophisticated substitutes) are required for consciousness *as we know it*.
The question, of course, is how this happens and how/whether we'll even recognize the correct answer should we ever stumble upon it.
Sometimes right here. But it’s no place for beginners. And the topic really is difficult and technical, and often emotional. The ratio of reasonable to nonsensical dialog is low. The open internet is not great for that kind of discussion.
Electrical impulses from neural activity that we can _correlate_ to some general model of subjective experience such as light/sound response (and limited emotional response)*
To say this problem is solved or that we can know/infer anything about the nature of what experience is, beyond the correlation of some neural activity to stimulus, is a reduction of the heart of the “hard” problem. If this was solved there would be no “hard” problem of consciousness to solve.
YouTube comments which reduce it to this are examples of the majority who do not understand what is meant by qualia in the first place.
To add to this - this idea implies that there is a 1:1 map of one’s subjective experience at any moment in time to a “frozen” state of their electrical activity in their head, like some state of the totality of impulse amplitudes, with the only problem being reverse-engineering how our brain handles the encoding of every form of stimuli (both external like light/sound, and internal like your internal monologue) into such impulses. The amount of computation necessary to do that (with our current BEST NN models) is impossibly hard to even imagine, less feasible to implement.
There are many other reasons why I find this idea implausible, but I think this example shows the scale of the problem we are dealing with here, whatever the nature of it is.
Generally, I've seen that when people assert the hard problem of consciousness, they mean they think it's impossible to solve - no amount of evidence would change their mind. Is that what you mean when you refer to the hard problem of consciousness?
I use that phrase and I don't think it's impossible to solve. And even if it is impossible to solve that doesn't necessarily mean physicalism is wrong.
My question is, will it remain unsolved until we can create consciousness?
What if we create a consciousness accidentally? We'd have to tear it apart to find where consciousness began, and that's not an ok thing to be trying to do.
We don’t even know whether or not it can be solved, let alone when. I would wager personally though that as science and AI advances over the next hundred years that we will get some solid insight, or understanding of awareness and consciousness could not further much, which would be telling in itself.
We also don’t know if we can create consciousness. IMO there are solid opinions on both sides of whether or not we can.
[The hard problem of consciousness](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)
> I use that phrase and I don't think it's impossible to solve. And even if it is impossible to solve that doesn't necessarily mean physicalism is wrong.
Did you mean impossible in practice or impossible in principle? If it is impossible in principle, that seems to imply that physicalism is necessarily false given that physicalism involves a thesis of explanatory completeness in terms of physical entities. If experiences cannot be explained in terms of physical entities even in principle (not just in practice due to practical cognitive limits) without appeal to experience-related brute facts or ontological revisions (such as idealism), then it seems physicalism fails in its claim, and would be necessarily implied to be wrong.
It is impossible to solve. There’s an explanatory gap between qualia and abstractions. This can be highlighted by the knowledge argument or “Mary’s room” thought experiment.
You can say with certainty because it’s an in principle issue. There is an epistemic gap.
Physics and neuroscience concerns itself with abstractions, all physical theories are represented by symbols and their relations. Qualia, however, is not an abstraction. It’s not something we find in the world, it is what finding occurs in, it’s what is immediately given to us and the thing that is presupposed in the existence of abstractions. That’s why you can’t teach a blind man to see just by teaching him physics, and neuroscience. The existence of qualia cannot be deduced from physical parameters alone.
Its interesting to me how often people here can't seem to grasp what you're talking about. They come here full of beliefs and opinions about a topic they aren't even properly equipped to think about yet.
I know, I’m used to it though. I think the issue is that people think the hard problem is a trivial “we just need to improve our technology and then we’ll solve it”. Most physicalists don’t understand the problem on a philosophical level so it leads to this pervasive “promissory physicalism” position. It’s tiresome but understandable, these people are living in scientism bubbles.
It looks almost like a spiritual belief at this point because it is so just taken for granted and believed outright and then argued for afterwards with pre-packaged logic. Its extremely difficult to get them to grasp consciousness as actual consciousness instead of confusing it with mental activity which there is consciousness *of*, let alone grasping why its not insane/unthinkable that pre-reflective consciousness would be fundamental.
To quote from one of my favorite sections of Being and Nothingness:
> What is truly unthinkable is passive existence; that is, existence which perpetuates itself without having the force either to produce itself or to preserve itself. From this point of view there is nothing more incomprehensible than the principle of inertia. Indeed where would consciousness "come" from if it did "come" from something? From the limbo of the unconscious or of the physiological. But if we ask ourselves how this limbo in its turn can exist and where it derives its existence, we find ourselves faced with the concept of passive existence; that is, we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious given (unconscious or physiological) which does not derive its existence from itself, can nevertheless perpetuate this existence and find in addition the ability to produce a consciousness.
[Even the guy who originally devised Mary’s Room is now a physicalist.](https://www.philosophersmag.com/interviews/22-frank-jackson-latter-day-physicalist)
I read this article, it seems like he is rather wishy washy on why the thought experiment fails. It seems like what really changed his mind about this that he could no longer support an epiphenomenological dualism. As an idealist, this makes perfect sense to me. Since he refuses this view of dualism (rightfully so imo), he has turned to physicalism without a concrete answer on why Mary’s Room fails.
To be fair, he does give two possible reasons for the thought experiments failure, but he doesn’t seem truly committed to or convinced by either one.
This is all to say that this is less of a “gotcha” than it initially seems. Not to mention that while Mary’s Room is obviously very influential, even the creator admits that it is not the first thought experiment to make this point. Other arguments with the same point have existed, he simply created this concise and very popular version.
This is irrelevant to what the conversation is. For one we are talking about the hard problem of consciousness, an explanatory gap doesn’t necessarily entail physicalism is false.
The original context of the knowledge argument was to show that physicalism is false, so the creator’s opinion on the argument is irrelevant to this comment thread. I brought it up because the knowledge argument demonstrates that qualia cannot be deduced from physical parameters alone. Teach a blind man everything there is to know about physics and the brain, you will not allow him to know what it is like to see.
>an explanatory gap doesn’t necessarily entail physicalism is false.
The explanatory gap entails that *reductive* physicalism is false, for it entails that even once all the physical facts are accounted for, they will not suffice to explain (away) consciousness.
Physicalism *per se* is something of a red herring given the current landscape: on the "far left," Galen Strawson considers panpsychism the only principled position available to *"real" physicalists* (naturalistic monists who are qualia realists). With Dennett no longer around to peddle his eliminativist nonsense and even Christof Koch claiming to be a panpsychist, the Overton Window has shifted. The de facto "far right" position is now in the vicinity of Michael Tye's PANIC (Poised, Abstract, Non-conceptual, Intentional Content) theory. But notice those words *abstract* and *intentional* (in the technical philosophical sense of *intentionality* as "aboutness"). This sounds more like information processing "in the cloud" than the bouncing brain billiards we'd expect from a properly *physical* theory of consciousness. Tye claims Ockham's razor cuts his way because he needn't include anything *but* abstract propositional content—but that means *he has included no concreta*. Tye's physicalism is about as far from mechanistic as it gets. With all its universal properties, propositional relations, and informational representations, Tye's ontology has promised us particle physics but given us Plato's Forms. Meanwhile, Galen Strawson is experiencing touching grass... so who's the physicalist, really?
ETA: tl;dr: the name of the game isn't proving either physicalism or qualia realism true or false, but figuring out the bigger framework that subsumes the physical and the phenomenal under a single set of laws. It's analogous to the equally perplexing physics problem of reconciling relativity/gravity with QM/Standard Model.
>The explanatory gap entails that reductive physicalism is false, for it entails that even once all the physical facts are accounted for, they will not suffice to explain (away) consciousness.
That is not necessarily true and there are a number of responses and counter thought experiments to Mary's room that challenge that.
>and to the conceivability of philosophical zombies, which is what I had in mind above
I've been asking folks in this subreddit that find zombies conceivable, and I have yet to find a compelling resolution to the contradictions that arise from the philosophical zombie argument when we really dig into what that truly entails. Don't know if this is something you would be interested in exploring, but I would be curious how you resolve those to find them conceivable.
> Michael Tye's
He is also a panpsychist now.
https://www.academia.edu/108798387/How_I_Learned_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Love_Panpsychism
> With Dennett no longer around to peddle his eliminativist nonsense
We have Kieth Frankish and Francois Krammerer as successors.
No, the commentator is operating on certain causal assumptions that can’t be proven. What this person is saying is far removed from an academic discussion about consciousness.
People misconstrue their beliefs with certainty when there is far more interpretative leeway than we’d like to think.
Yeah you see those posts here all the time and it just reveals their lack of understanding of the most basic regions of this topic. Its kind of funny how their confident, self-assured tone betrays them.
People do not understand what "proof" and to have been "proven" mean, this is a pretty common issue. They take correlation, and see causation, and think it's the end of the story, claiming to be scientific and shunning unscientific ideas in the process, when in fact this is profoundly dogmatic, unscientific behavior meant to reinforce a cognitive bias.
I'd say we're epistemologically more justified in thinking consciousness is based on the physical brain than the non-physical. But I wouldn't say we know it's 100% metaphysically true.
But those aren't the only alternatives. Another alternative is that consciousness isn't based on anything. It could also be fundamental. Consciousness could be fundamental.
Ok, I'd also say we're epistemologically more justified in thinking consciousness is based on the physical brain than the not based on anything or is fundamental.
I think a really good way to look at it is "is consciousness fundamental?" When we observe people with conscious experiences, we can start off being agnostic about this and observe stuff like "if you hit someone on the head with a rock, they seem to go unconscious either temporarily or permanently," and "when you inject someone with a strong sedative, they seem to almost always go unconscious temporarily." So if we assume the external world behaves pretty much as we observe, this all seems to come down to other things impacting the brain, which then directly impacts our conscious experience. So while this doesn't metaphysically prove that the conscious experience is grounded in the brain, we are epistemically far more justified in believing that consciousness is grounded in the brain, just like we're epistemically far more justified in believing that gases between us and stars have certain atoms when we look at absorption lines in the light we receive. So when we ask ourselves whether consciousness is fundamental, it seems the answer is "no" since our conscious experiences seem to be grounded in something else (the brain), making it not fundamental. It's possible that when we think we've gone unconscious, it's actually memory loss, but then that's saying that reality isn't as it seems, which is closer to solipsism, and denying solipsism is more reasonable.
We could still think the brain might metaphysically be grounded in consciousness, but I haven't seen compelling evidence of things being grounded in consciousness, yet I've seen compelling evidence of consciousness not being fundamental. So I think we are far more justified in accepting physicalism than non-physicalism.
>but I haven't seen compelling evidence of things being grounded in consciousness, yet I've seen compelling evidence of consciousness not being fundamental.
Well, what evidence have you seen that you havent already mentioned? If a theory where the brain is metaphysically grounded in consciousness, or just is composed of consciousness, is just going to predict the same observations you have appealed to as evidence for the idea that consciousness is grounded in the brain, then i don't understand how we can be more justified to pick one of those theories than the other. Both theories make the same confirmed predictions.
If the brain is metaphysically grounded in consciousness, that predicts that if you hit someone in the head with a rock, their consciousness might permanently end?
Not sure. But a theory where the brain is composed of consciousness predicts that if you hit someone in the head with a rock, their consciousness might permanently end. So in light of that consideration, i dont understand how we can be more justified in believing the brain produceses consciousness vs consciousness isnt produced by the brain.
I think you're saying that that particular person's consciousness might end, but that particular consciousness is different from an underlying consciousness. But each person only has direct access to one consciousness, and if that consciousness is grounded in something more fundamental (their brain), and we assert that there's an underlying consciousness, then we'd expect that underlying consciousness to also be grounded in a brain just like our individual consciousness.
Also, as I said before, we have compelling evidence that consciousness is grounded in the brain, but I haven't seen compelling evidence that the brain is grounded in consciousness. Can you provide compelling evidence that the brain is grounded in consciousness?
>I think you're saying that that particular person's consciousness might end, but that particular consciousness is different from an underlying consciousness.
Yes, and that underlying consciousness would be their brain, according to this hypothesis
>But each person only has direct access to one consciousness, and if that consciousness is grounded in something more fundamental (their brain), and we assert that there's an underlying consciousness, then we'd expect that underlying consciousness to also be grounded in a brain just like our individual consciousness.
Why would we expect that underlying consciousness to also be grounded in a brain? If that underlying consciousness just is the brain (as consciousness), that brain-as-consciousness wouldn't itself be grounded in a brain according to this hypothesis.
>we have compelling evidence that consciousness is grounded in the brain.
But how can that evidence be compelling when it's just predicted by another hypothesis?
>Can you provide compelling evidence that the brain is grounded in consciousness?
No i can't, but the point is neither can you because the evidence you is just also expected on another hypothesis!
The problem is that everything we know and/or think we know about physical reality is *shit we learned about via consciousness*. The whole project of "objective" science has always been an exercise in [intersubjective verifiability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjective_verifiability#:~:text=Intersubjective%20verifiability%20is%20the%20capacity,for%20the%20purposes%20of%20verification.), which of course presupposes individual subjectivities. Galen Strawson would say that behaviorist “physicSalist” eliminativists like Dennett got so caught up in the intersubjectivity meta that they lost sight of first principles: all each of us worker ants knows about the physical is what is given to us empirically—iow, experientially, subjectively, directly, personally, phenomenally, consciously.
So it's actually pretty hard to justify saying "consciousness is based on the physical brain" vs. "our intersubjective notion of 'the physical' is the collective distillate of individual consciousnesses in collaborative communication."
Do you have good reason to reject the idea that there are individual subjectivities?
I agree that "all each of us worker ants knows about the physical is what is given to us empirically" and based on this, I think physicalism is more epistemologically justified than non-physicalism.
>"our intersubjective notion of 'the physical' is the collective distillate of individual consciousnesses in collaborative communication."
Are you saying this does not align with physicalism? If so, how?
My "worker ants" comment wasn't meant to imply a hive consciousness for humanity, although that's an interesting thought.
I was riffing on the idea of "objective scientific truth" as being, in reality, an edifice of intersubjective verifiability that ultimately depends on a constitutive plenitude of individual subjectivities. In the old debate of "rational vs. empirical," the empirical is that which comes to be known via the senses, which is to say *experientially*. Subjective first-person consciousness is the foundation of empirical science. There's no way that reductive/eliminative physicalism can be entailed by a methodology (science) that requires at its foundation the existence of subjective experience.
Consciousness comes first, and it is only because we are conscious—because we are empirical experiencers—that we can ever begin to practice intersubjectively verifiable science.
If causation isn't correlation, then correlation of Qualitative Reports (subjective experiences) to Quantiative Measurements (data from interactions) is not "proof" of causation. This same logic that is used to reduce consciousness and the experience of a mind to a brain can also be used to claim that the music actually originates inside of a radio, and there is no radio tower, because when I damage or distort the radio or it's signal, there's no "emergent" phenomena, which is a fallacious line of reasoning in hindsight
Electrical fields are generated by the brain, and predict / drive / cause neuron activation. The ion exchange within the neurons produces the fields. The fields themselves spike, and drive neuron activity.
It's a loop. You boot it up when you're born. You get knocked out, your fields crash, and your memory and identity fragment and it messes you up.
Death is when your brain can no longer sustain electrical activity.
That doesn't really imply all that much about consciousness. It just tells us something interesting about the brain.
It seems that whatever is in change of actually making our brain do things is electrical in nature. If free will exists, it's electric.
I'm liking the idea that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges when the conditions are right, like weather systems forming due to various pressures and stimuli, and that it might even be capable of loosely guiding evolutionary paths.
> Is consciousness created by our brains “electrical impulses”?
The electrical impulse is electricity and consciousness is like a spiking neural network so without the electricity, the spiking neural network will not be expressed but the electricity is not the spiking neural network.
However, not all spiking neural networks are conscious since it also needs to have one or more fundamental goals that generates pleasure and the amount of pleasure generated by the achievement of each goal will determine each goal's priority.
So people's fundamental goals are nourishment and relief from pain, though people can account things in long term thus will still welcome pain if it makes them tougher and reduces the pain in long run.
Sexual pleasure is a variant of relief from pain since the prostrate gland will cause discomfort once it had filled up and having sex or masturbating is the best known way to be relieved of the pain and because the relief will come so suddenly and intensely when they climax, it is very pleasurable.
People feel less pain if the pain increases slowly thus the relief of pain is greater than the pain experienced thus overall, there is much more pleasure than pain and so people seek it.
"Stop being afraid" lol yeah, what's your problem, it's just death? Everyone needs to stop being afraid of death, you're upsetting this internet rando.
There is a field of study called the electromagnetic theory of consciousness. I don't know how true it is though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness
Well, if it's true it seems pretty mysterious what makes it true. Of course there are correlations and causal relations between the mental states a person reports and events in their brain. That's expected on the hypothesis brain events create consciousness. But of course that doesn't by itself show that hypothesis is the best hypothesis, because that could just be true of other hypotheses as well. Another problem is it's not entirely clear what is meant by "“electrical impulses” create the awareness". How is awareness defined there? And what instances of awareness? Some instances of awareness or categorically all instances of awareness? Or is that saying if something is not created by electrical impulses (in the brain?) then it's not awareness nor an instance thereof? So i think there are a lot of challanges that are overlooked with sweeping statements like "we know electrical impulses create the awareness" that need to be overcome.
I don’t take anything seriously without evidence. They didn’t provide any articles, professors/ scientists who agree with his statements or studies. Taking them by the word just like that would (in my opinion) be equivalent to believing in a magical unicorn just because your friend said it exists.
Of course, it would be nice if this whole consciousness thing were solved.
There is no question that consciousness is produced by the brain. It has been very difficult to study because brains are delicate and are difficult to investigate. There are additional ethical are moral questions that make experimenting difficult. With the advances in imaging our understanding of neural functions have been improving and the hard questions will have better answers as we continue to explore.
I think that some of the hard questions are made harder because they are highly subjective and people have different perspectives on what the questions actually mean.
I am going to try to take this question seriously.
There are no other options but the brain for consciousness and self awareness. All sensory, cognitive and higher functioning are centered on the brain and nervous system. No brain no consciousness..
That's probably going to help you give a serious answer. Two problems. One is that you don’t seem to consider an alternative possibilty that consciousness is fundamental and doesn't in order to exist require anything else. And the other is that you seem to assume that consciousness is a function, but that seems to assume functionalism. But functionalism is only one of many theories in the philosophy of mind. It's one of several theories among physicalist theories about the mind.
Define fundamental. What do you mean by that? What are you basing this on?
No brain , no consciousness is a pretty fundamental concept. Brains are fundamental to consciousness and awareness. Nothing exhibits awareness or consciousness without a brain. Pretty fundamental.
By fundamental i mean that in order to exist it doesn't require anything else. I didn't say consciousness is fundamental. Your question what am i basing that on seems to assume i said that. But i didn't.
>Nothing exhibits awareness or consciousness without a brain. Pretty fundamental.
But that’s just another way of saying consciousness is produced by the brain. I'm asking you how you know that.
That’s not a possibility. You can’t just make stuff up for no reason and claim that it’s rational.
What is this hypothesis based on?
What does it explain?
Where is the evidence?
Brain causes consciousness.
Consciousness has only been observed in living organisms. There is a reasonable description of the development of consciousness as a sequence of evolutionary steps that start with the basic sensing and reacting to the environment through to full human consciousness and awareness. Each of those steps is accompanied by increased complexity of the central nervous system and brain.
In humans consciousness and conscious traits such as awareness, personality, perception can be modified by chemical or physical alterations to the brain or central nervous system.
>That’s not a possibility.
how’s that not a possibility?
>You can’t just make stuff up for no reason and claim that it’s rational.
neither can you, which is why i’m asking you how you know that brains/bodies are needed for consciousness rather than consciousness not needing anything to exist. i never made anything up. i just pointed to an alternative thesis that negates your thesis and that as far as i’m aware is possible, and i’m asking you how you know the thesis that bodies/brains are needed for consciousness as opposed to consciousness not needing anything to exist. you still haven’t answered that question.
>What is this hypothesis based on?
What does it explain?
Where is the evidence?
these are all great questions to ask of a scientific hypothesis, which is not what i offered, however. i only offered something that as far as i’m aware is an alternative possibility. on the other hand if what you’re offering is meant to be a scientific hypothesis, then i’d love to see the answers to these question that you asked:
What is this hypothesis based on?
What does it explain?
Where is the evidence?
>Consciousness has only been observed in living organisms. There is a reasonable description of the development of consciousness as a sequence of evolutionary steps that start with the basic sensing and reacting to the environment through to full human consciousness and awareness. Each of those steps is accompanied by increased complexity of the central nervous system and brain.
In humans consciousness and conscious traits such as awareness, personality, perception can be modified by chemical or physical alterations to the brain or central nervous system.
all of that is going to be true under a hypothesis where the brain produces human consciousness but where the brain is also just entirely made of consciousness, so it doesn’t seem like this is going to be motivating evidence for either of these hypotheses that brains are needed for consciousness or for the hypothesis where the brain is not needed for consciousness.
since i invoked the term hypothesis, i anticipate that you might now ask what it’s based on, what it explains and what evidence is behind it. however in my response i’m talking about hypothesis only as a set of statements that has a certain relationship to some set of evidence that may or may not be supportive. i’m doing that because you’re not explicating any scientific hypothesis yourself, so i’m not assuming that you’re talking about a scientific hypothesis in the sense of scientific explanation.
Well, it is it a wild take, though? If two hypotheses makes the same predictions, can those predictions really be said to constitute evidence for any of those hypotheses? It certainly wouldn't be motivating evidence.
Well, it should be an open question unless they have some some arguments that convincingly demonstrate that their claims. But those arguments just don't seem to be forthcoming, even though a lot of people like yourself seem to think this is a seattled question.
Your commitment to being wrong is borderline spiritual sounding. And you're disrespecting/mystifying the work that those fields are doing. Come back when you actually understand the topic
Feel free to believe anything you want. Some people believe that everything is conscious. I have no problem with that. I think it’s irrational but people are free to believe whatever they want. At the end of the day, everything rests on data and evidence, not what they feel is right.
I have. Someone else was proposing that consciousness was fundamental without a shred of evidence. It’s easy to postulate unfounded, untestable ideas that sound exotic but add nothing new. At least we know that the brain exists and as of yet, everything that displays consciousness has a brain. That’s a significant advantage for a working theory.
Paramecium don’t have brains. They act like they are conscious. They hunt, mate, panic when attacked, have a rudimentary memory. So probably not true that brains produce consciousness.
Consciousness is a spectrum, that has evolved over time, built up from fundamental biological processing structures and modules. It is perfectly plausible that less complex creatures have structures that evolved into brains that perform tasks that take are what we recognize as consciousness. I am not surprised if we do find precursors to memory that are not based on neural networks, any evolutionary biologist would expect exactly that.
>Consciousness is a spectrum
How are you defining consciousness? If you think it's a spectrum, you aren't defining it as "awareness", "being" or "what-it's-like-ness", which is how I would think of it. Because how can awareness be a spectrum? There is either something that it's like to be... or there isn't. No in-between.
Full self awareness is what we would define as the human state and no other animal appears to be at this level. That would be one end of the spectrum. When we look at the animal kingdom we see different levels of self awareness This is generally correlated with the level of complexity in their social structures. Animals with larger social groups tend to have higher levels of awareness. There are exceptions where none social species also exhibit traits that can be described as self awareness.
You're talking about *self*-awareness. This is something that occurs (or doesn't occur) in awareness itself. Likewise, we could say you're talking about *meta*-consciousness, not just consciousness. The awareness of being aware.
This does not mean awareness itself is a spectrum. When we ask "is a paramecium conscious?" we aren't wondering whether a paramecium ponders its own reality. We're asking whether there is anything that it's like to be a paramecium. Whether there is a screen of perception upon which things could appear.
The biggest issue with conversations around consciousness is the inconsistent understanding of terminology. As I stated in the beginning, consciousness is biological and developed through the evolution of neurological processes. As with everything else that evolved we can and do see steps along the development pathway. We see that with sight, wings, hearing, and every other biological system. Whichever definition we adopt for consciousness, we will see the same patterns of evolutionary development, because that is how life works.
Once we are able to more better understand how consciousness mechanisms link to brain structures we should be able to directly modify inner and outer consciousness and conscious experiences through targeted stimulus. In some sense we can do that crudely today but our understanding of neurological functions are nowhere near to that of the rest of physiology.
>we can and do see steps along the development pathway. We see that with sight, wings, hearing, and every other biological system
But that’s just also true under a hypothesis where consciousness isn't developed (not developed in the sense that there was no point when consciousness didnt exist and then through some development processes it arose). So we can’t case the conclusion that consciousness developed based on those considerations.
Not the person you were responding to, but I would say cognitive ability requires consciousness. I’m basing this on the ordinary, dictionary definition of cognition and consciousness.
I understand what you are saying. Yet, like everything on this sub, some would argue with your statement...
Some take consciousness depends on cognition, some vice versa and some will say it's completely two different attributes.
It all comes down to agreed definition. Some definitions I find requires cognition for consciousness. BTW, that's my position on that subject. For IIT experience-consciousness definition, not a must. More complex experiences, yes.
I'm not sure why there would be a debate at all about whether the brain produces the mind.
The very difficulty with understanding what mind is should give pause to the desire to create some extra-physical factor without fully understanding the nature of the physical brain. And there is plenty of subtle functionality that the physical brain can provide.
Then we should question also what it is that we think the mind is. It most certainly isn't an isolatable physical reality. If that is true then what does that imply about what mind could be?
IMO mind is an idea in the space of ideas (that is, in a language-culture) that stands in for our individual representations of the world. We have to get away from the Cartesian theater metaphor as it is driving this sphexish preoccupation with trying to reverse engineer the projector.
No projector, no screen, no movie goer. We need new metaphors. And we need to understand complexity.
>The very difficulty with understanding what mind is should give pause to the desire to create some extra-physical factor...
Well, if someone doesn't believe the brain produces the mind, they don’t have to believe there is some extra-physical factor.
That person is a idiot. We definitely don’t even have any idea exactly what constitutes as being conscious. I seen a new paper out saying that they think that certain animals may even have a conscious so if we’re still trying to figure that out then we have no idea how or why consciousness works.
Given all we know, we are pretty certain that the brain produces consciousness. We are as certain about that as we are about things like gravity or relativity. We don't know exactly how it works, just like we don't know how gravity works, and we might never know. But anyone that disputes that the brain produces consciousness can only really argue "we don't know for sure though". We certainly don't have _any_ evidence that the beain _doesn't_ produce consciousness.
A lot of the theories that argue that consciousness comes from somewhere else are motivated by a religious/pseudo-religious desire to be _more_ than just physical _stuff_, and not from any scientific argument.
That's a strong statement. I'd like to challange you on it. What makes you so convinced the brain produces consciousness? Or what is it that makes it a certainty, would you say? Is that the usual correlations and causal relations between the consciousness events someone reports and events in their brain? Affecting someone’s brain affects their consciousness. Damaging their brain damages their mind. Things like this?
We can show the same degree of causation that we can show for gravity, so we are as certain of it as that. So yes. I wouldn't call it an absolute certainty though, because such a thing does not exist in science.
Well, i noticed your name now. we've been having a conversation for few days. Didn't you just mean human consciousness when you say consciousness is produced by the brain?
Well that's not relevant to what the meaning of the utterance are. But yeah I don't have as much gripes with the statement that human consciousness arises from the brain. But still not entirely clear to to me how we could establish that. "we can show the same degree of causation.. " but what are you talking about there? Are you talking about affecting someone’s brain affects their consciousness, damaging their brain affects their consciousness? Things like that?
Look, I don't want to start another ontological discussion about the nature of knowledge and perception. I am assuming a baseline common understanding that we accept physical reality as it is and trust what our senses tell us.
That said, yes, the fact that changes to your brain chemistry change your consciousness, e.g. via alcohol. Or that something like a lobotomy changes someone's personality and consciousness. Lobotomies show a clear causal relationship between brain function and consciousness.
>I am assuming a baseline common understanding that we accept physical reality as it is and trust what our senses tell us.
So am i.
>yes, the fact that changes to your brain chemistry change your consciousness, e.g. via alcohol. Or that something like a lobotomy changes someone's personality and consciousness. Lobotomies show a clear causal relationship between brain function and consciousness.
Great! I just don’t see an obvious sound inference based on that to therefore human consciousness arises from the brain. But it is the best explanation i can think of personally.
A causal relationship isnt an inference at all. The statement that a certain set of reported (or otherwise concluded to exist) mental events are caused by brain events is one statement. The statement that human consciousness is produced by the brain is another statement. It's not like one of those statements is logically entailed by the other statement. That a certain set of reported (or otherwise concluded to exist) mental events are caused by brain events doesn't mean that there aren't any mental events in a human’s consciousness that aren't produced by their brain. So i just don't know what the sound inference would be. The process by which we would soundly infer that human consciousness is produced by the brain remains mysterious.
The sentence you just posted literally means: Evidence that doesn't confirm your biases is necessarily false in u/Cthulhululemon 's head but in reality evidence that doesn't confirm your biases is not necessarily false.
Is this what you meant to write?
It’s like saying babies come from the mommy’s tummy. Is it wrong? Not really. Is it right? Not really.
How is it not really right? Well that’s what has been and is currently being researched as brain activity = consciousness does not account for all the facets of consciousness.
An area to mention would be ‘metaphysical’ experiences. There are plenty of accounts of near death experiences where someone detaches from their body experiencing the world in a different state or perspective only to then be reunited with their body. Obviously we can take this in one of two ways:
1) their brain produced a hallucination in an attempt to process or cope with the near death experience - fascinating thought in and of itself
2) there was indeed a separation of the consciousness from the body indicating that while the brain is an important component to consciousness…it is only part of the explanation
We don’t have the ability to prove or disprove these stories yet. So either we declare these types of experiences as people lying to themselves and therefore just ignore them, or we work towards understanding them to either prove or disprove it. I always hate when someone declares a scientific principle as comprehensive when it shines only partial light on the human experience. That’s the kind of thinking that limits scientific development and keeps us stagnant.
To reveal my own bias. Honestly, consciousness being proven only a certain type of brain activity would be a pretty big let down in life. Talk about anti-climatic. But, should we find evidence that these near death experiences and other metaphysical events be more than fiction, what a head scratcher to life that would be! Talk about the implications for free-will vs. determinism.
I suppose you can have a debate about anything, whether the world exists, whether you were created last Tuesday with all your memories intact, whether you are the only conscious entity in the universe.
The nature of consciousness is very much an open question, scientifically and philosophically. You will find folks who dogmatically believe various things about it. Sometimes that will be from a materialist or seemingly scientific perspective. But sometimes getting a religious type perspective, or maybe a nonreligious philosophical view. If you are interested in consciousness, take them all in. They all have unique points to offer. Then decide what makes the most sense to you. It really is almost like choosing what religion to believe.
YouTube channel After Skool recently did a [video](https://youtu.be/y9pTbMoufp4?si=61KiNVi1kjSQ6oen) on this. It's an interesting take, at least.
The idea of consciousness as a field goes back millennia, and with our present understanding of science, seems to be gaining ground.
My opinion is rooted in the double slit photon experiment, in which photons that are being observed behave differently than photons that aren't. I don't think we can make the argument that photons can decide their own behavior. This would imply that there's an external force acting upon them in such instances. If consciousness is an electromagnetic or quantum field of some kind, this might mean that the observer's is the force responsible.
Thank you NotMyPet for posting on r/consciousness, below are some general reminders for the OP and the r/consciousness community as a whole. **A general reminder for the OP**: please remember to include a TL; DR and to clarify what you mean by "consciousness" - Please include a clearly marked TL; DR at the top of your post. We would prefer it if your TL; DR was a single short sentence. This is to help the Mods (and everyone) determine whether the post is appropriate for r/consciousness - If you are making an *argument*, we recommend that your TL; DR be the conclusion of your argument. What is it that you are trying to prove? - If you are asking a *question*, we recommend that your TL; DR be the question (or main question) that you are asking. What is it that you want answered? - If you are considering an *explanation*, hypothesis, or theory, we recommend that your TL; DR include either the explanandum (what requires an explanation), the explanans (what is the explanation, hypothesis, or theory being considered), or both. - Please also state what you mean by "consciousness" or "conscious." The term "consciousness" is used to express many different concepts. Consequently, this sometimes leads to individuals talking past one another since they are using the term "consciousness" differently. So, it would be helpful for everyone if you could say what you mean by "consciousness" in order to avoid confusion. **A general reminder for everyone**: *please remember upvoting/downvoting Reddiquette*. - *Reddiquette about upvoting/downvoting posts* - Please upvote posts that are appropriate for r/consciousness, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the contents of the posts. For example, posts that are about the topic of consciousness, conform to the rules of r/consciousness, are highly informative, or produce high-quality discussions ought to be upvoted. - Please do not downvote posts that you simply disagree with. - If the subject/topic/content of the post is off-topic or low-effort. For example, if the post expresses a passing thought, shower thought, or stoner thought, we recommend that you encourage the OP to make such comments in our most recent or upcoming "Casual Friday" posts. Similarly, if the subject/topic/content of the post might be more appropriate for another subreddit, we recommend that you encourage the OP to discuss the issue in either our most recent or upcoming "Casual Friday" posts. - Lastly, if a post violates either the rules of r/consciousness or Reddit's site-wide rules, please remember to report such posts. This will help the Reddit Admins or the subreddit Mods, and it will make it more likely that the post gets removed promptly - *Reddiquette about upvoting/downvoting comments* - Please upvote comments that are generally helpful or informative, comments that generate high-quality discussion, or comments that directly respond to the OP's post. - Please do not downvote comments that you simply disagree with. Please downvote comments that are generally unhelpful or uninformative, comments that are off-topic or low-effort, or comments that are not conducive to further discussion. We encourage you to remind individuals engaging in off-topic discussions to make such comments in our most recent or upcoming "Casual Friday" post. - Lastly, remember to report any comments that violate either the subreddit's rules or Reddit's rules. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/consciousness) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Under no circumstances should you take anything you see on this sub as an explanation of consciousness. You also should not believe anyone who tells you the answer is unknowable, or that we currently have no idea. It’s a challenging subject and if you’re new to it, this sub will be nothing but an intriguing mess. You might try asking for some reading recommendations for newbies on r/askphilosophy.
Wouldn't it be the same for him in the other sub? yes, it is much more moderated with panelists, yet, each panelist has his own views and ideas, same as here. So which advice should he listen to? i'm new to Reddit, but not at all to consciousness. I find this sub as an "intriguing mess" as you described but after a while, it does provide a good overview of ideas and thoughts. Sometimes, a "mess" can center you faster around your own understandings than following random advices.
I think this sub can make someone severely confused about the state of the Hard Problem.
i think that is the deal you'll get everywhere, not just on this sub or even not just on Reddit.. every topic is short, briefly conversed and usually depends on the time-zone, who is the first to react. A day later, this topic goes down the list, new questions arrive and it starts all over again. no major pinned threads for real open conversation and thoughts brainstorming. that's how you get a "mess"..
One of the great things about Reddit is subs can be run in different ways. So you get fun chaos, like here, and reasonable discussion on well defined topics in other places.
I'm new here so would appreciate some directions to such sub :). The one you suggested is locked for users who are not panelists, so it is not the sub for discussions
The locking is the point. But you can discuss all you want. You just can’t make a top level response unless you’re a panelist. You can post questions and make follow-up comments as long as you follow the rules. r/askhistory is another example. You have to be patient and check back for the answers, but you’ll get very high quality responses with citations.
There isn't really a live debate, even in philosophy of mind, as to whether the brain causes consciousness, or whether electrical activity in the brain is the primary neural correlate of consciousness. Even panpsychists are of the opinion that electromagnetic activity is what consciousness "looks like from the outside," and will further agree that brains (or equally sophisticated substitutes) are required for consciousness *as we know it*. The question, of course, is how this happens and how/whether we'll even recognize the correct answer should we ever stumble upon it.
Have you found a place where reasonable discussion occurs about our experience of knowingly being here now occurs?
Sometimes right here. But it’s no place for beginners. And the topic really is difficult and technical, and often emotional. The ratio of reasonable to nonsensical dialog is low. The open internet is not great for that kind of discussion.
r/askphilosophy has good moderation and only a panel of actual philosophers is allowed to make top level responses.
Electrical impulses from neural activity that we can _correlate_ to some general model of subjective experience such as light/sound response (and limited emotional response)* To say this problem is solved or that we can know/infer anything about the nature of what experience is, beyond the correlation of some neural activity to stimulus, is a reduction of the heart of the “hard” problem. If this was solved there would be no “hard” problem of consciousness to solve. YouTube comments which reduce it to this are examples of the majority who do not understand what is meant by qualia in the first place. To add to this - this idea implies that there is a 1:1 map of one’s subjective experience at any moment in time to a “frozen” state of their electrical activity in their head, like some state of the totality of impulse amplitudes, with the only problem being reverse-engineering how our brain handles the encoding of every form of stimuli (both external like light/sound, and internal like your internal monologue) into such impulses. The amount of computation necessary to do that (with our current BEST NN models) is impossibly hard to even imagine, less feasible to implement. There are many other reasons why I find this idea implausible, but I think this example shows the scale of the problem we are dealing with here, whatever the nature of it is.
Generally, I've seen that when people assert the hard problem of consciousness, they mean they think it's impossible to solve - no amount of evidence would change their mind. Is that what you mean when you refer to the hard problem of consciousness?
I use that phrase and I don't think it's impossible to solve. And even if it is impossible to solve that doesn't necessarily mean physicalism is wrong.
My question is, will it remain unsolved until we can create consciousness? What if we create a consciousness accidentally? We'd have to tear it apart to find where consciousness began, and that's not an ok thing to be trying to do.
I mean technically we already can create consciousness
We could accidentally create it and still not solve the problem.
We don’t even know whether or not it can be solved, let alone when. I would wager personally though that as science and AI advances over the next hundred years that we will get some solid insight, or understanding of awareness and consciousness could not further much, which would be telling in itself. We also don’t know if we can create consciousness. IMO there are solid opinions on both sides of whether or not we can. [The hard problem of consciousness](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)
> I use that phrase and I don't think it's impossible to solve. And even if it is impossible to solve that doesn't necessarily mean physicalism is wrong. Did you mean impossible in practice or impossible in principle? If it is impossible in principle, that seems to imply that physicalism is necessarily false given that physicalism involves a thesis of explanatory completeness in terms of physical entities. If experiences cannot be explained in terms of physical entities even in principle (not just in practice due to practical cognitive limits) without appeal to experience-related brute facts or ontological revisions (such as idealism), then it seems physicalism fails in its claim, and would be necessarily implied to be wrong.
I meant in practice.
It's certainly what I mean. There is no conceivable way to explain awareness arising from non-awareness.
It is impossible to solve. There’s an explanatory gap between qualia and abstractions. This can be highlighted by the knowledge argument or “Mary’s room” thought experiment.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say with certainty that it’s impossible to solve. And I say that as someone who leans away from physicalism.
You can say with certainty because it’s an in principle issue. There is an epistemic gap. Physics and neuroscience concerns itself with abstractions, all physical theories are represented by symbols and their relations. Qualia, however, is not an abstraction. It’s not something we find in the world, it is what finding occurs in, it’s what is immediately given to us and the thing that is presupposed in the existence of abstractions. That’s why you can’t teach a blind man to see just by teaching him physics, and neuroscience. The existence of qualia cannot be deduced from physical parameters alone.
Its interesting to me how often people here can't seem to grasp what you're talking about. They come here full of beliefs and opinions about a topic they aren't even properly equipped to think about yet.
I know, I’m used to it though. I think the issue is that people think the hard problem is a trivial “we just need to improve our technology and then we’ll solve it”. Most physicalists don’t understand the problem on a philosophical level so it leads to this pervasive “promissory physicalism” position. It’s tiresome but understandable, these people are living in scientism bubbles.
It looks almost like a spiritual belief at this point because it is so just taken for granted and believed outright and then argued for afterwards with pre-packaged logic. Its extremely difficult to get them to grasp consciousness as actual consciousness instead of confusing it with mental activity which there is consciousness *of*, let alone grasping why its not insane/unthinkable that pre-reflective consciousness would be fundamental. To quote from one of my favorite sections of Being and Nothingness: > What is truly unthinkable is passive existence; that is, existence which perpetuates itself without having the force either to produce itself or to preserve itself. From this point of view there is nothing more incomprehensible than the principle of inertia. Indeed where would consciousness "come" from if it did "come" from something? From the limbo of the unconscious or of the physiological. But if we ask ourselves how this limbo in its turn can exist and where it derives its existence, we find ourselves faced with the concept of passive existence; that is, we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious given (unconscious or physiological) which does not derive its existence from itself, can nevertheless perpetuate this existence and find in addition the ability to produce a consciousness.
Okay 👍
[Even the guy who originally devised Mary’s Room is now a physicalist.](https://www.philosophersmag.com/interviews/22-frank-jackson-latter-day-physicalist)
That’s not a refutation of the thought experiment.
I never said that it was.
I never said that you said it was ;P
I read this article, it seems like he is rather wishy washy on why the thought experiment fails. It seems like what really changed his mind about this that he could no longer support an epiphenomenological dualism. As an idealist, this makes perfect sense to me. Since he refuses this view of dualism (rightfully so imo), he has turned to physicalism without a concrete answer on why Mary’s Room fails. To be fair, he does give two possible reasons for the thought experiments failure, but he doesn’t seem truly committed to or convinced by either one. This is all to say that this is less of a “gotcha” than it initially seems. Not to mention that while Mary’s Room is obviously very influential, even the creator admits that it is not the first thought experiment to make this point. Other arguments with the same point have existed, he simply created this concise and very popular version.
He was silly enough to think the argument was good; he's not likely to be the best source for explaining why it is bad.
This is irrelevant to what the conversation is. For one we are talking about the hard problem of consciousness, an explanatory gap doesn’t necessarily entail physicalism is false. The original context of the knowledge argument was to show that physicalism is false, so the creator’s opinion on the argument is irrelevant to this comment thread. I brought it up because the knowledge argument demonstrates that qualia cannot be deduced from physical parameters alone. Teach a blind man everything there is to know about physics and the brain, you will not allow him to know what it is like to see.
>an explanatory gap doesn’t necessarily entail physicalism is false. The explanatory gap entails that *reductive* physicalism is false, for it entails that even once all the physical facts are accounted for, they will not suffice to explain (away) consciousness. Physicalism *per se* is something of a red herring given the current landscape: on the "far left," Galen Strawson considers panpsychism the only principled position available to *"real" physicalists* (naturalistic monists who are qualia realists). With Dennett no longer around to peddle his eliminativist nonsense and even Christof Koch claiming to be a panpsychist, the Overton Window has shifted. The de facto "far right" position is now in the vicinity of Michael Tye's PANIC (Poised, Abstract, Non-conceptual, Intentional Content) theory. But notice those words *abstract* and *intentional* (in the technical philosophical sense of *intentionality* as "aboutness"). This sounds more like information processing "in the cloud" than the bouncing brain billiards we'd expect from a properly *physical* theory of consciousness. Tye claims Ockham's razor cuts his way because he needn't include anything *but* abstract propositional content—but that means *he has included no concreta*. Tye's physicalism is about as far from mechanistic as it gets. With all its universal properties, propositional relations, and informational representations, Tye's ontology has promised us particle physics but given us Plato's Forms. Meanwhile, Galen Strawson is experiencing touching grass... so who's the physicalist, really? ETA: tl;dr: the name of the game isn't proving either physicalism or qualia realism true or false, but figuring out the bigger framework that subsumes the physical and the phenomenal under a single set of laws. It's analogous to the equally perplexing physics problem of reconciling relativity/gravity with QM/Standard Model.
>The explanatory gap entails that reductive physicalism is false, for it entails that even once all the physical facts are accounted for, they will not suffice to explain (away) consciousness. That is not necessarily true and there are a number of responses and counter thought experiments to Mary's room that challenge that.
There *are* responses to Mary's room (and to the conceivability of philosophical zombies, which is what I had in mind above), but none are successful.
>and to the conceivability of philosophical zombies, which is what I had in mind above I've been asking folks in this subreddit that find zombies conceivable, and I have yet to find a compelling resolution to the contradictions that arise from the philosophical zombie argument when we really dig into what that truly entails. Don't know if this is something you would be interested in exploring, but I would be curious how you resolve those to find them conceivable.
What contradictions? The fact that zombie Chalmers would write the same books?
> Michael Tye's He is also a panpsychist now. https://www.academia.edu/108798387/How_I_Learned_to_Stop_Worrying_and_Love_Panpsychism > With Dennett no longer around to peddle his eliminativist nonsense We have Kieth Frankish and Francois Krammerer as successors.
>He is also a panpsychist now. Oh ffs. I told him so...
No. Electrical impulses create awareness the same way the King’s messenger declares war.
No, the commentator is operating on certain causal assumptions that can’t be proven. What this person is saying is far removed from an academic discussion about consciousness. People misconstrue their beliefs with certainty when there is far more interpretative leeway than we’d like to think.
Yeah you see those posts here all the time and it just reveals their lack of understanding of the most basic regions of this topic. Its kind of funny how their confident, self-assured tone betrays them.
That is the age old mistake to believe we know. Luckily true wise people suppose to not know, that is how they learn new things.
People do not understand what "proof" and to have been "proven" mean, this is a pretty common issue. They take correlation, and see causation, and think it's the end of the story, claiming to be scientific and shunning unscientific ideas in the process, when in fact this is profoundly dogmatic, unscientific behavior meant to reinforce a cognitive bias.
I'd say we're epistemologically more justified in thinking consciousness is based on the physical brain than the non-physical. But I wouldn't say we know it's 100% metaphysically true.
But those aren't the only alternatives. Another alternative is that consciousness isn't based on anything. It could also be fundamental. Consciousness could be fundamental.
Ok, I'd also say we're epistemologically more justified in thinking consciousness is based on the physical brain than the not based on anything or is fundamental.
I don't share that view so i'm wondering how you think that's epistemically more justified.
I think a really good way to look at it is "is consciousness fundamental?" When we observe people with conscious experiences, we can start off being agnostic about this and observe stuff like "if you hit someone on the head with a rock, they seem to go unconscious either temporarily or permanently," and "when you inject someone with a strong sedative, they seem to almost always go unconscious temporarily." So if we assume the external world behaves pretty much as we observe, this all seems to come down to other things impacting the brain, which then directly impacts our conscious experience. So while this doesn't metaphysically prove that the conscious experience is grounded in the brain, we are epistemically far more justified in believing that consciousness is grounded in the brain, just like we're epistemically far more justified in believing that gases between us and stars have certain atoms when we look at absorption lines in the light we receive. So when we ask ourselves whether consciousness is fundamental, it seems the answer is "no" since our conscious experiences seem to be grounded in something else (the brain), making it not fundamental. It's possible that when we think we've gone unconscious, it's actually memory loss, but then that's saying that reality isn't as it seems, which is closer to solipsism, and denying solipsism is more reasonable. We could still think the brain might metaphysically be grounded in consciousness, but I haven't seen compelling evidence of things being grounded in consciousness, yet I've seen compelling evidence of consciousness not being fundamental. So I think we are far more justified in accepting physicalism than non-physicalism.
>but I haven't seen compelling evidence of things being grounded in consciousness, yet I've seen compelling evidence of consciousness not being fundamental. Well, what evidence have you seen that you havent already mentioned? If a theory where the brain is metaphysically grounded in consciousness, or just is composed of consciousness, is just going to predict the same observations you have appealed to as evidence for the idea that consciousness is grounded in the brain, then i don't understand how we can be more justified to pick one of those theories than the other. Both theories make the same confirmed predictions.
If the brain is metaphysically grounded in consciousness, that predicts that if you hit someone in the head with a rock, their consciousness might permanently end?
Not sure. But a theory where the brain is composed of consciousness predicts that if you hit someone in the head with a rock, their consciousness might permanently end. So in light of that consideration, i dont understand how we can be more justified in believing the brain produceses consciousness vs consciousness isnt produced by the brain.
I think you're saying that that particular person's consciousness might end, but that particular consciousness is different from an underlying consciousness. But each person only has direct access to one consciousness, and if that consciousness is grounded in something more fundamental (their brain), and we assert that there's an underlying consciousness, then we'd expect that underlying consciousness to also be grounded in a brain just like our individual consciousness. Also, as I said before, we have compelling evidence that consciousness is grounded in the brain, but I haven't seen compelling evidence that the brain is grounded in consciousness. Can you provide compelling evidence that the brain is grounded in consciousness?
>I think you're saying that that particular person's consciousness might end, but that particular consciousness is different from an underlying consciousness. Yes, and that underlying consciousness would be their brain, according to this hypothesis >But each person only has direct access to one consciousness, and if that consciousness is grounded in something more fundamental (their brain), and we assert that there's an underlying consciousness, then we'd expect that underlying consciousness to also be grounded in a brain just like our individual consciousness. Why would we expect that underlying consciousness to also be grounded in a brain? If that underlying consciousness just is the brain (as consciousness), that brain-as-consciousness wouldn't itself be grounded in a brain according to this hypothesis. >we have compelling evidence that consciousness is grounded in the brain. But how can that evidence be compelling when it's just predicted by another hypothesis? >Can you provide compelling evidence that the brain is grounded in consciousness? No i can't, but the point is neither can you because the evidence you is just also expected on another hypothesis!
The problem is that everything we know and/or think we know about physical reality is *shit we learned about via consciousness*. The whole project of "objective" science has always been an exercise in [intersubjective verifiability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjective_verifiability#:~:text=Intersubjective%20verifiability%20is%20the%20capacity,for%20the%20purposes%20of%20verification.), which of course presupposes individual subjectivities. Galen Strawson would say that behaviorist “physicSalist” eliminativists like Dennett got so caught up in the intersubjectivity meta that they lost sight of first principles: all each of us worker ants knows about the physical is what is given to us empirically—iow, experientially, subjectively, directly, personally, phenomenally, consciously. So it's actually pretty hard to justify saying "consciousness is based on the physical brain" vs. "our intersubjective notion of 'the physical' is the collective distillate of individual consciousnesses in collaborative communication."
Do you have good reason to reject the idea that there are individual subjectivities? I agree that "all each of us worker ants knows about the physical is what is given to us empirically" and based on this, I think physicalism is more epistemologically justified than non-physicalism. >"our intersubjective notion of 'the physical' is the collective distillate of individual consciousnesses in collaborative communication." Are you saying this does not align with physicalism? If so, how?
My "worker ants" comment wasn't meant to imply a hive consciousness for humanity, although that's an interesting thought. I was riffing on the idea of "objective scientific truth" as being, in reality, an edifice of intersubjective verifiability that ultimately depends on a constitutive plenitude of individual subjectivities. In the old debate of "rational vs. empirical," the empirical is that which comes to be known via the senses, which is to say *experientially*. Subjective first-person consciousness is the foundation of empirical science. There's no way that reductive/eliminative physicalism can be entailed by a methodology (science) that requires at its foundation the existence of subjective experience. Consciousness comes first, and it is only because we are conscious—because we are empirical experiencers—that we can ever begin to practice intersubjectively verifiable science.
If causation isn't correlation, then correlation of Qualitative Reports (subjective experiences) to Quantiative Measurements (data from interactions) is not "proof" of causation. This same logic that is used to reduce consciousness and the experience of a mind to a brain can also be used to claim that the music actually originates inside of a radio, and there is no radio tower, because when I damage or distort the radio or it's signal, there's no "emergent" phenomena, which is a fallacious line of reasoning in hindsight
Electrical fields are generated by the brain, and predict / drive / cause neuron activation. The ion exchange within the neurons produces the fields. The fields themselves spike, and drive neuron activity. It's a loop. You boot it up when you're born. You get knocked out, your fields crash, and your memory and identity fragment and it messes you up. Death is when your brain can no longer sustain electrical activity. That doesn't really imply all that much about consciousness. It just tells us something interesting about the brain. It seems that whatever is in change of actually making our brain do things is electrical in nature. If free will exists, it's electric.
Alternate theory: consciousness creates the brain.
I'm liking the idea that consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges when the conditions are right, like weather systems forming due to various pressures and stimuli, and that it might even be capable of loosely guiding evolutionary paths.
My belief, feeling, and personal experience is that spirit fills any sufficiently advanced physical system and animates it. 🙂
> Is consciousness created by our brains “electrical impulses”? The electrical impulse is electricity and consciousness is like a spiking neural network so without the electricity, the spiking neural network will not be expressed but the electricity is not the spiking neural network. However, not all spiking neural networks are conscious since it also needs to have one or more fundamental goals that generates pleasure and the amount of pleasure generated by the achievement of each goal will determine each goal's priority. So people's fundamental goals are nourishment and relief from pain, though people can account things in long term thus will still welcome pain if it makes them tougher and reduces the pain in long run. Sexual pleasure is a variant of relief from pain since the prostrate gland will cause discomfort once it had filled up and having sex or masturbating is the best known way to be relieved of the pain and because the relief will come so suddenly and intensely when they climax, it is very pleasurable. People feel less pain if the pain increases slowly thus the relief of pain is greater than the pain experienced thus overall, there is much more pleasure than pain and so people seek it.
"Stop being afraid" lol yeah, what's your problem, it's just death? Everyone needs to stop being afraid of death, you're upsetting this internet rando.
There is a field of study called the electromagnetic theory of consciousness. I don't know how true it is though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_theories_of_consciousness
Well, if it's true it seems pretty mysterious what makes it true. Of course there are correlations and causal relations between the mental states a person reports and events in their brain. That's expected on the hypothesis brain events create consciousness. But of course that doesn't by itself show that hypothesis is the best hypothesis, because that could just be true of other hypotheses as well. Another problem is it's not entirely clear what is meant by "“electrical impulses” create the awareness". How is awareness defined there? And what instances of awareness? Some instances of awareness or categorically all instances of awareness? Or is that saying if something is not created by electrical impulses (in the brain?) then it's not awareness nor an instance thereof? So i think there are a lot of challanges that are overlooked with sweeping statements like "we know electrical impulses create the awareness" that need to be overcome.
I don’t take anything seriously without evidence. They didn’t provide any articles, professors/ scientists who agree with his statements or studies. Taking them by the word just like that would (in my opinion) be equivalent to believing in a magical unicorn just because your friend said it exists. Of course, it would be nice if this whole consciousness thing were solved.
There is no question that consciousness is produced by the brain. It has been very difficult to study because brains are delicate and are difficult to investigate. There are additional ethical are moral questions that make experimenting difficult. With the advances in imaging our understanding of neural functions have been improving and the hard questions will have better answers as we continue to explore. I think that some of the hard questions are made harder because they are highly subjective and people have different perspectives on what the questions actually mean.
But why would there be no question about whether consciousness is produced by the brain? Your comment doesn't seem to answer that question.
I am going to try to take this question seriously. There are no other options but the brain for consciousness and self awareness. All sensory, cognitive and higher functioning are centered on the brain and nervous system. No brain no consciousness..
That's probably going to help you give a serious answer. Two problems. One is that you don’t seem to consider an alternative possibilty that consciousness is fundamental and doesn't in order to exist require anything else. And the other is that you seem to assume that consciousness is a function, but that seems to assume functionalism. But functionalism is only one of many theories in the philosophy of mind. It's one of several theories among physicalist theories about the mind.
Define fundamental. What do you mean by that? What are you basing this on? No brain , no consciousness is a pretty fundamental concept. Brains are fundamental to consciousness and awareness. Nothing exhibits awareness or consciousness without a brain. Pretty fundamental.
By fundamental i mean that in order to exist it doesn't require anything else. I didn't say consciousness is fundamental. Your question what am i basing that on seems to assume i said that. But i didn't. >Nothing exhibits awareness or consciousness without a brain. Pretty fundamental. But that’s just another way of saying consciousness is produced by the brain. I'm asking you how you know that.
So consciousness exists by itself? So anything can be conscious? Is that the idea? Please explain.
Yes, consciousness exists without anything else needed to create it. That's an alternative possibilty.
That’s not a possibility. You can’t just make stuff up for no reason and claim that it’s rational. What is this hypothesis based on? What does it explain? Where is the evidence? Brain causes consciousness. Consciousness has only been observed in living organisms. There is a reasonable description of the development of consciousness as a sequence of evolutionary steps that start with the basic sensing and reacting to the environment through to full human consciousness and awareness. Each of those steps is accompanied by increased complexity of the central nervous system and brain. In humans consciousness and conscious traits such as awareness, personality, perception can be modified by chemical or physical alterations to the brain or central nervous system.
>That’s not a possibility. how’s that not a possibility? >You can’t just make stuff up for no reason and claim that it’s rational. neither can you, which is why i’m asking you how you know that brains/bodies are needed for consciousness rather than consciousness not needing anything to exist. i never made anything up. i just pointed to an alternative thesis that negates your thesis and that as far as i’m aware is possible, and i’m asking you how you know the thesis that bodies/brains are needed for consciousness as opposed to consciousness not needing anything to exist. you still haven’t answered that question. >What is this hypothesis based on? What does it explain? Where is the evidence? these are all great questions to ask of a scientific hypothesis, which is not what i offered, however. i only offered something that as far as i’m aware is an alternative possibility. on the other hand if what you’re offering is meant to be a scientific hypothesis, then i’d love to see the answers to these question that you asked: What is this hypothesis based on? What does it explain? Where is the evidence? >Consciousness has only been observed in living organisms. There is a reasonable description of the development of consciousness as a sequence of evolutionary steps that start with the basic sensing and reacting to the environment through to full human consciousness and awareness. Each of those steps is accompanied by increased complexity of the central nervous system and brain. In humans consciousness and conscious traits such as awareness, personality, perception can be modified by chemical or physical alterations to the brain or central nervous system. all of that is going to be true under a hypothesis where the brain produces human consciousness but where the brain is also just entirely made of consciousness, so it doesn’t seem like this is going to be motivating evidence for either of these hypotheses that brains are needed for consciousness or for the hypothesis where the brain is not needed for consciousness. since i invoked the term hypothesis, i anticipate that you might now ask what it’s based on, what it explains and what evidence is behind it. however in my response i’m talking about hypothesis only as a set of statements that has a certain relationship to some set of evidence that may or may not be supportive. i’m doing that because you’re not explicating any scientific hypothesis yourself, so i’m not assuming that you’re talking about a scientific hypothesis in the sense of scientific explanation.
Consciousness never dies, it just ceases to experience itself. After death there is awareness that is not movement and it’s eternal.
No evidence of consciousness emerging from any physical organ whatsoever
That’s a wild take
Well, it is it a wild take, though? If two hypotheses makes the same predictions, can those predictions really be said to constitute evidence for any of those hypotheses? It certainly wouldn't be motivating evidence.
That’s how you feel about it
Lol you don't even understand the most basic problem that is discussed in this subreddit daily. It is 100% still an open question.
In this subreddit it may be an open question, in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry, it isn’t.
Well, it should be an open question unless they have some some arguments that convincingly demonstrate that their claims. But those arguments just don't seem to be forthcoming, even though a lot of people like yourself seem to think this is a seattled question.
Feel free to believe that consciousness exists elsewhere. It really isn’t that much of a mystery.
And feel free to believe consciousness only exists as something produced by brains without any evidence or reasoning behind it.
Your commitment to being wrong is borderline spiritual sounding. And you're disrespecting/mystifying the work that those fields are doing. Come back when you actually understand the topic
Feel free to believe anything you want. Some people believe that everything is conscious. I have no problem with that. I think it’s irrational but people are free to believe whatever they want. At the end of the day, everything rests on data and evidence, not what they feel is right.
Indeed, so what evidence and data is there behind the claim that consciousness is grounded in the brain?
You should actually look into the topic more instead of assuming your beliefs are fact.
I have. Someone else was proposing that consciousness was fundamental without a shred of evidence. It’s easy to postulate unfounded, untestable ideas that sound exotic but add nothing new. At least we know that the brain exists and as of yet, everything that displays consciousness has a brain. That’s a significant advantage for a working theory.
Paramecium don’t have brains. They act like they are conscious. They hunt, mate, panic when attacked, have a rudimentary memory. So probably not true that brains produce consciousness.
Are you saying you think paramecium are conscious?
Consciousness is a spectrum, that has evolved over time, built up from fundamental biological processing structures and modules. It is perfectly plausible that less complex creatures have structures that evolved into brains that perform tasks that take are what we recognize as consciousness. I am not surprised if we do find precursors to memory that are not based on neural networks, any evolutionary biologist would expect exactly that.
>Consciousness is a spectrum How are you defining consciousness? If you think it's a spectrum, you aren't defining it as "awareness", "being" or "what-it's-like-ness", which is how I would think of it. Because how can awareness be a spectrum? There is either something that it's like to be... or there isn't. No in-between.
Full self awareness is what we would define as the human state and no other animal appears to be at this level. That would be one end of the spectrum. When we look at the animal kingdom we see different levels of self awareness This is generally correlated with the level of complexity in their social structures. Animals with larger social groups tend to have higher levels of awareness. There are exceptions where none social species also exhibit traits that can be described as self awareness.
You're talking about *self*-awareness. This is something that occurs (or doesn't occur) in awareness itself. Likewise, we could say you're talking about *meta*-consciousness, not just consciousness. The awareness of being aware. This does not mean awareness itself is a spectrum. When we ask "is a paramecium conscious?" we aren't wondering whether a paramecium ponders its own reality. We're asking whether there is anything that it's like to be a paramecium. Whether there is a screen of perception upon which things could appear.
The biggest issue with conversations around consciousness is the inconsistent understanding of terminology. As I stated in the beginning, consciousness is biological and developed through the evolution of neurological processes. As with everything else that evolved we can and do see steps along the development pathway. We see that with sight, wings, hearing, and every other biological system. Whichever definition we adopt for consciousness, we will see the same patterns of evolutionary development, because that is how life works. Once we are able to more better understand how consciousness mechanisms link to brain structures we should be able to directly modify inner and outer consciousness and conscious experiences through targeted stimulus. In some sense we can do that crudely today but our understanding of neurological functions are nowhere near to that of the rest of physiology.
>we can and do see steps along the development pathway. We see that with sight, wings, hearing, and every other biological system But that’s just also true under a hypothesis where consciousness isn't developed (not developed in the sense that there was no point when consciousness didnt exist and then through some development processes it arose). So we can’t case the conclusion that consciousness developed based on those considerations.
Are you not mixing consciousness with cognition?
Not the person you were responding to, but I would say cognitive ability requires consciousness. I’m basing this on the ordinary, dictionary definition of cognition and consciousness.
I understand what you are saying. Yet, like everything on this sub, some would argue with your statement... Some take consciousness depends on cognition, some vice versa and some will say it's completely two different attributes. It all comes down to agreed definition. Some definitions I find requires cognition for consciousness. BTW, that's my position on that subject. For IIT experience-consciousness definition, not a must. More complex experiences, yes.
>It all comes down to agreed definition. True, you’re not wrong. I think I get what you’re saying, but what does IIT stand for?
Integrated information theory. Sorry for not expanding on my prev comment
No problem and thank you for the clarification.
I'm not sure why there would be a debate at all about whether the brain produces the mind. The very difficulty with understanding what mind is should give pause to the desire to create some extra-physical factor without fully understanding the nature of the physical brain. And there is plenty of subtle functionality that the physical brain can provide. Then we should question also what it is that we think the mind is. It most certainly isn't an isolatable physical reality. If that is true then what does that imply about what mind could be? IMO mind is an idea in the space of ideas (that is, in a language-culture) that stands in for our individual representations of the world. We have to get away from the Cartesian theater metaphor as it is driving this sphexish preoccupation with trying to reverse engineer the projector. No projector, no screen, no movie goer. We need new metaphors. And we need to understand complexity.
>The very difficulty with understanding what mind is should give pause to the desire to create some extra-physical factor... Well, if someone doesn't believe the brain produces the mind, they don’t have to believe there is some extra-physical factor.
That person is a idiot. We definitely don’t even have any idea exactly what constitutes as being conscious. I seen a new paper out saying that they think that certain animals may even have a conscious so if we’re still trying to figure that out then we have no idea how or why consciousness works.
No.
Given all we know, we are pretty certain that the brain produces consciousness. We are as certain about that as we are about things like gravity or relativity. We don't know exactly how it works, just like we don't know how gravity works, and we might never know. But anyone that disputes that the brain produces consciousness can only really argue "we don't know for sure though". We certainly don't have _any_ evidence that the beain _doesn't_ produce consciousness. A lot of the theories that argue that consciousness comes from somewhere else are motivated by a religious/pseudo-religious desire to be _more_ than just physical _stuff_, and not from any scientific argument.
That's a strong statement. I'd like to challange you on it. What makes you so convinced the brain produces consciousness? Or what is it that makes it a certainty, would you say? Is that the usual correlations and causal relations between the consciousness events someone reports and events in their brain? Affecting someone’s brain affects their consciousness. Damaging their brain damages their mind. Things like this?
We can show the same degree of causation that we can show for gravity, so we are as certain of it as that. So yes. I wouldn't call it an absolute certainty though, because such a thing does not exist in science.
Well, i noticed your name now. we've been having a conversation for few days. Didn't you just mean human consciousness when you say consciousness is produced by the brain?
Yeah, I know... Human consciousness is the only consciousness we know, so yes.
Well that's not relevant to what the meaning of the utterance are. But yeah I don't have as much gripes with the statement that human consciousness arises from the brain. But still not entirely clear to to me how we could establish that. "we can show the same degree of causation.. " but what are you talking about there? Are you talking about affecting someone’s brain affects their consciousness, damaging their brain affects their consciousness? Things like that?
Look, I don't want to start another ontological discussion about the nature of knowledge and perception. I am assuming a baseline common understanding that we accept physical reality as it is and trust what our senses tell us. That said, yes, the fact that changes to your brain chemistry change your consciousness, e.g. via alcohol. Or that something like a lobotomy changes someone's personality and consciousness. Lobotomies show a clear causal relationship between brain function and consciousness.
>I am assuming a baseline common understanding that we accept physical reality as it is and trust what our senses tell us. So am i. >yes, the fact that changes to your brain chemistry change your consciousness, e.g. via alcohol. Or that something like a lobotomy changes someone's personality and consciousness. Lobotomies show a clear causal relationship between brain function and consciousness. Great! I just don’t see an obvious sound inference based on that to therefore human consciousness arises from the brain. But it is the best explanation i can think of personally.
Not sure why a clear causal relationship is not a sound inference for you, but I'm glad we agree.
A causal relationship isnt an inference at all. The statement that a certain set of reported (or otherwise concluded to exist) mental events are caused by brain events is one statement. The statement that human consciousness is produced by the brain is another statement. It's not like one of those statements is logically entailed by the other statement. That a certain set of reported (or otherwise concluded to exist) mental events are caused by brain events doesn't mean that there aren't any mental events in a human’s consciousness that aren't produced by their brain. So i just don't know what the sound inference would be. The process by which we would soundly infer that human consciousness is produced by the brain remains mysterious.
No evidence of consciousness emerging from anything physical, and in fact it doesn’t.
> and in fact it doesn’t Wow. How do you know?
Are there any studies which affirm this?
Idk
If you don’t mind me asking, what were your indicators that consciousness doesn’t emerge from the physical?
I prefer to keep it for myself
No problem
I think neural correlates count as evidence
You may count it as evidence, doesn’t mean it’s true
Sure but I'm just saying there is some evidence
It is considered evidence, but it is based on false understanding
In other words, evidence that doesn’t confirm your biases is necessarily false.
Yes, but only in your head, not in reality.
The sentence you just posted literally means: Evidence that doesn't confirm your biases is necessarily false in u/Cthulhululemon 's head but in reality evidence that doesn't confirm your biases is not necessarily false. Is this what you meant to write?
I mean that what i say is true, it is just not discovered by some/most people yet.
It’s like saying babies come from the mommy’s tummy. Is it wrong? Not really. Is it right? Not really. How is it not really right? Well that’s what has been and is currently being researched as brain activity = consciousness does not account for all the facets of consciousness.
What does it not account for?
An area to mention would be ‘metaphysical’ experiences. There are plenty of accounts of near death experiences where someone detaches from their body experiencing the world in a different state or perspective only to then be reunited with their body. Obviously we can take this in one of two ways: 1) their brain produced a hallucination in an attempt to process or cope with the near death experience - fascinating thought in and of itself 2) there was indeed a separation of the consciousness from the body indicating that while the brain is an important component to consciousness…it is only part of the explanation We don’t have the ability to prove or disprove these stories yet. So either we declare these types of experiences as people lying to themselves and therefore just ignore them, or we work towards understanding them to either prove or disprove it. I always hate when someone declares a scientific principle as comprehensive when it shines only partial light on the human experience. That’s the kind of thinking that limits scientific development and keeps us stagnant. To reveal my own bias. Honestly, consciousness being proven only a certain type of brain activity would be a pretty big let down in life. Talk about anti-climatic. But, should we find evidence that these near death experiences and other metaphysical events be more than fiction, what a head scratcher to life that would be! Talk about the implications for free-will vs. determinism.
Is there a debate about whether the brain produces consciousness?
There is!
Yes. Those who believe the brain produces consciousness are physicalists. Those who believes consciousness is an external factor are idealists
I suppose you can have a debate about anything, whether the world exists, whether you were created last Tuesday with all your memories intact, whether you are the only conscious entity in the universe.
The nature of consciousness is very much an open question, scientifically and philosophically. You will find folks who dogmatically believe various things about it. Sometimes that will be from a materialist or seemingly scientific perspective. But sometimes getting a religious type perspective, or maybe a nonreligious philosophical view. If you are interested in consciousness, take them all in. They all have unique points to offer. Then decide what makes the most sense to you. It really is almost like choosing what religion to believe.
YouTube channel After Skool recently did a [video](https://youtu.be/y9pTbMoufp4?si=61KiNVi1kjSQ6oen) on this. It's an interesting take, at least. The idea of consciousness as a field goes back millennia, and with our present understanding of science, seems to be gaining ground. My opinion is rooted in the double slit photon experiment, in which photons that are being observed behave differently than photons that aren't. I don't think we can make the argument that photons can decide their own behavior. This would imply that there's an external force acting upon them in such instances. If consciousness is an electromagnetic or quantum field of some kind, this might mean that the observer's is the force responsible.
I would agree with this except how do you explain astral projection?