The brain, a bunch of electricity, fat and neurons, cannot produce consciousness.

One can't see into the mind of a person by blindly picking apart the brain, otherwise, Einstein's brain could have been mined for his genius long after his death.

There is no consciousness inherent in a bunch of unconscious matter...

Non-physical, unmeasureable consciousness creates and directs unconscious matter, not the other way around.

And this is, in part, why DMT is such a mysterious molecule.

The same could be said for the layman not being able to tell what sort of music ,or any information, is on a hard drive by blindly taking it apart.
Perhaps, in the future we can see into the mind of a person and work out exactly what they are thinking by observing the brain, not as you say blindly, but with accrued knowledge. It is currently possible to observe certain brain regions that are consistently associated with conscious perception.

I guess that it would be more difficult once the subject had died as there would more than likely be no more consciousness to study.

I fully agree.

I don't feel that consciousness is a product of the physical body...

---

Funny story about Einstein's brain: Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the pathologist conducting Albert Einstein's autopsy, after the autopsy was preformed, stole the brain...

-eg

Look at lichen, lichen are a fungi and an algae / cyanobacteria

They appear to be a single organism, in fact we believed that it was a single organism until our microscopes became advanced enough to tell them appart...

I feel consciousness and the physical body are similar, they are so closely intertwined that it's difficult to tell them appart, the conscious half influences the physical half and vis versa, so you would expect to see areas of the brain responding to the consciousness it's become entangled with...

Even if you were able to "read" a humans brain, and "see" their thoughts or memories, you still could not bring the consciousness back to the dead physical matter, the consciousness has clearly left...In my mind it was never generated by the physical body, it was never actually a "piece" of it, it was just deeply and intimately intertwined with it.

-eg

Except that the brain has never been proven to contain any consciousness. Correlation isn't necessarily causation. There are parallels between consciousness and brain activity, yes, but not always. It is curious that psychedelics have a tendency to reduce brain activity... you'd think it would be the opposite, if consciousness were really produced in the brain. So, evidence seems to point to the brain being a receiver of consciousness, not the source.

A pity that psychiatry and psychology tend to be dominated by the materialist mindset...

Exactly this.

Guys these are very woolly answers unless you add your definitions of what consciousness is in order to support your theories. My definition of consciousness is the processing and reaction to information. So, in effect, i would concede that consciousness could be external in the form of interacting information. It's not a perfect definition and i am open to critique.

Consciousness is...

Awareness...

Being aware of your "awareness"

-eg

It is all conscious(ness).

tseuq

(To be) Aware, stems from the word "wary" and thus, can be seen as the highest form of reactiveness, in a sense immediate and spontaneous reaction to action upon oneself.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=aware

If a meteor, hurling through space at a fast pace, collides with another, bigger one, he is certainly reacting to this experience with the utmost awareness.

Dead matter does not imply the absence of consciousness in my opinion,
maybe this argument is just based upon a difference in categorising the Conscious Spectrum?


On Topic: Those are interesting studys, I will take my proper time to read them, thanks for sharing!

These are opinions. Not facts.

I personally also like to believe that i'm more than just a biological computer.

But as far as i know, counsciousness is still a mystery. We simply don't know.
We dó know ofcourse, that there is a very close relationship between counsciousness and the brain. We know that some types of braindamage can alter your personality, that substances that affect the brain, can also affect counsciousness, that certain feelings and sensations correlate with activity in certain brain-areas.

But we don't know what counsciousness realy is. So let's not make any claims. But lets' just say: "i think this or that", instead of "this or that is the truth, and that's the way it is".

Why would you nessecarily expect psychedelic's to stimulate the brain instead of reducing activity? Because the psychedelic mindstate is 'higher'?

But what if we only perceive it as being higher? What if the psychedelic state of mind is only qualitatively, a higher state instead of quantitatively? And what if a higher state of mind could be produced, not by more brain activity, but by a better quality of brain-activity. What if quantity is not what it's all about?

The title of the thread is putting the cart WAY before the horse. Like, the cart is in the next town over and accelerating.

The data presented here is correlational and NOT causal - you cannot say that consciousness stabilizes brain activity any more than you can say that brain stability in a particular range causes consciousness to emerge (my hunch is that it's the later one).

Anyone arguing that consciousness is not an emergent property of our nervous system has to reckon with some facts (and these are facts, they are not speculation or hypothesis, I can cite all of them if you want me to):

- Changes to the function of one area of the brain change the quality of our consciousness. This is pretty strong evidence that our conscious experience is modulated by the connectivity of neural circuits. Change the connectivity, you change consciousness.
- Damage to the brain, or inhibition of certain circuits causes consciousness to diminish - look at the work being done with anesthetics and patients with disorders of consciousness caused by traumatic brain injury.
- Similarly, measurable changes in brain connectivity correlate with increased or decreased levels of consciousness controlled by the administration of anesthetics.
- The same is true of unconscious sleep, dreaming sleep, and wakefulness.

If you are claiming that consciousness comes from somewhere else and isn't an emergent property of the brain, it's on you to hypothesize where it is, how it communicates with and interacts with the brain, and how it gives rise to the experience of qualia.

My theory, which is based on my best understanding of the existing science is that consciousness is, somehow (don't ask how) an emergent property of integrated information and network complexity and the quality of consciousness stems from the 'shape' of the network doing the integration of information.

Somewhere between total chaos and total harmony there exists some sweet spot of complexity that allows consciousness to occur. The best evidence I can provide for this is electroencephalographic data looking at people rendered unconscious by seizures and in normal, deep, dreamless sleep. The seizure patient's brainwaves will be a totally chaotic mass, while the slow-wave sleeper will all be in very syncopated harmony.

Wakeful brainwaves are in between.

It's like the boundary of the fractal Mandelbrot set: between the two extremes of total containment and running off to infinity there is a thin, but infinitely intricate and beautiful middle zone. That's where consciousness is.

Blessings
~ND

There may be a lot of correlations between brain and nervous system activity, but does that really mean that consciousness is caused by them?

You can damage the brain and nervous system, yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean permanent mental damage. I personally see it more as, the radio was damaged, so the signal is going to be expressed in a distorted fashion. Fix the radio, and proper expression of the signal will also return, such as (partially?) curing Alzheimer's with coconut oil, or fixing inflammatory gut disorders that seem to be a major cause behind Autism, or removing the part of the brain that is damaged.

Nevermind that, despite all humanity's advances in understanding how the brain works, we still have no idea how the brain and consciousness truly interact from a scientific perspective.

What I find convincing is how extraordinarily complex and intelligent psychedelic experiences are compared to our ordinary state of mind. At first glance people say "I never new my mind could do that!"

But is it due to our brains having immense capabilities but yet are dormant and only operate in the common mode of everyday brain activity or are the psychedelics changing something beyond the physical?

It wouldn't make much sense to say that the fabric of physical matter is awareness. How could such a thing even create matter?

If you want to say consciousness precedes matter then you are going to have to define or at least redefine what consciousness actually is.

It's like how people throw around the term GOD without actually defining it completely.

You can't argue that the title is misleading if it is just a accurate rephrase of the scientific paper's title, which is "Cortical activity is more stable when sensory stimuli are consciously perceived". Thread title is "We are not all mindless zombies because consciousness makes brain activity more stable & dynamic". Perhaps you misinterpreted. I was saying that if we didn't have conscious awareness then our brains would less stable and less dynamic and be unconscious. If that doesn't sound like a zombie to you then I don't know what does. I was saying that the role consciousness plays is to make our brains more stable and complex, less zombie like which is I think in coherence with the paper title.

Granted it is about conscious perception and not pure awareness, nevertheless conscious perception requires pure awareness in order for anything to be perceived. Pure awareness is what is when there is no sensory stimuli but yet you are aware of yourself existing.

The second paper is just an add on that describes how rich information transferal between networks of the brain is seen in wakefulness but yet network connectivity between major areas of the brain still occurs when someone is unconscious. So it was saying it was the dynamics and complexity of the information transferred that was linked to conscious awareness (perhaps the cause of) "show that a rich functional dynamics might constitute a signature of consciousness".



If information integration theory is true then consciousness can be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex process, for instance electricity running through a computer, data traveling through the electromagnetic spectrum.

A good question is what causes the sweet spot to occur? Why is that it only occurs just when a specific amount of harmony or interaction is achieved? Mathematics? Connection to other dimensions or even nonphysical states?

Both, I dare say, because non-physical mind and brain are so intertwined...

Is it that the brain has immense capabilities, or is it that the mind does? You can have many people at the peak of their physical health, and yet, their minds and what they can handle and understand will be quite different, due to their personalities. You can have people extremely capable with mechanical work and others brilliant with intellectual stuff, but not vice-versa.

What immense capabilities can one find in the crazy firing of tons of neurons electricity all over the place? Nothing inherently intelligent, though complex... there must be something guiding and producing the brain's activity. Perhaps something... non-physical?

Maybe it is the limitation of words that cause the confusion. We have no words to really accurately, without the possibility of subjective interpretation, describe what that "thing" is that we call "consciousness", "awareness", "mind". Even "soul" and "spirit" do not suffice, because everyone has their own definition.

Where did physical matter come from? How does physical matter even work, at it's root? We have all these particles and molecules... but what makes them do stuff? What's behind their... liveliness, so to speak? Some non-physical potential that defines their behaviour and interactions? Even "empty" space has an energy, "ether", Tesla and Einstein(?) called it. What is this "ether"? Where did the forces of gravity come from? What about time and space?

They don't create themselves... because how can they? What differentiates living matter from non-living? Complexity of matter? Extremely complex machines are no more conscious than before, despite being complex and being able to be programmed to do specific tasks... they never become conscious. They never act outside their programming.

Yet living things can, to some extent, if they think and believe they can.

The subject is extremely complex... we may have a small inkling of an understanding of the brain, but the sciences still have not a clue what "consciousness" is. It can't be measured. Emotions can't be quanitified... awareness can't be quanitified.

In essence, none of us egos really have a coherent idea of how to clearly define consciousness, because we just don't really understand it's true nature.

Materialist science doesn't have the answers, despite claiming that it will, with enough research, many times, so we need to look elsewhere. Materialism, as a philosophy, has utterly failed to deliver us the answers of existence, despite many promises that it would and will. It hasn't, yet, so there is no reason to presume that it ever can or will, despite how vigourously and loudly its proponents claim.

/rant