So if consciousness is a 'wave', generated by external magical forces, then why do people not share the same contents of consciousness? (of course we are assuming that the brain is just a dumb receiver, as if it was the generator then this thread is answered already)

Do we measure these external 'waves' using any medical receiving equipment?
We measure waves (or action potentials) being fired from neurons in the brain, which suggests that the brain is the generator of these 'waves'

I think I've commented enough on this thread. I hear a lot of 'what if's' and such, which is one of the great qualities of the human mind, but the data is not gravitating towards an external force of magic.

The experts (not philosophers and pseudo-scientists) in the field are studying the brain for consciousness, not the ether.

...Now to ingest some DMT to effect neurons in my brain to alter my state of consciousness.... or perhaps I can just spray some DMT in the air and chant 'abracadabra'

<3

I like to look at the brain as a vessel (or tool) for consciousness... a complex chemical network which allows consciousness to manifest in a self aware form (mind?) - as far as I am aware this can't really be proved otherwise by physical measurements, as the chemical measurements of the brain and consciousness can also be perceived as a relationship/interaction.. a fine tuning of consciousness.

at the end of the day we don't know much more than the fact that we are having an experience.. and no matter how much we measure the objects within that experience, there is not really anyway of getting behind it to confirm those findings without implicating consciousness as the finder of said information and thus making something seemingly objective in actual fact subjective by nature.. even a scientist measuring the chemical interactions in the brain is having an experience of doing said activity. theres really no way of objectively understanding the actual content of the experiences of consciousness, as the understanding itself would have to be an experience.. hoping i'm making sense here

if somebody dies and the brain activity is non active, this could also just mean that the particular mode of consciousness that the brain creates has been destroyed - and that consciousness may just revert to another state of being

I get your position Mr Shadow, totally, and to a large degree I resonate with it, however I think you may have quite fixed views about consciousness and the brain is and that we have the whole consciousness/mind/brain area mostly wrapped up in a nice little package, and I'm really not sure we do...I am very much for continued research into the brain and consciousness but this is an incredibly vast terrain, and I believe to a large extent, unexplored. And just to throw it out there, perhaps the brain could be both generator and receiver; it doesn't necessarily have to be one or the other.

Remember, until about the mid 80's, it was thought that we were born with a set number of brain cells, and after a certain point, that was your lot for life, and it was ludicrous to think otherwise. Well we now know that certain parts of the brain do in fact produce neural stem cells, from which new neurons sprout throughout our adult life span. Lucid dreams have been long reported by people and are an important part of Tibetan dream yoga, and yet they were only validated by science even more recently, and have themselves opened up a new frontier of consciousness research.

I don't think anyone needs to subscribe to "external magical forces" and I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe only in the natural, or bollocks...I am however open to the possibility that some phenomena labelled as "supernatural" now may in the future be found to be natural phenomena, once our scientific measuring sticks have been more refined, being that science is ever a work in progress.

And consciousness wise, we need to be careful when making broad sweeping statements, science is quite poor at studying rare black swan phenomena, and it particularly struggles with studying consciousness in some respects.

According to some people, people can and do share contents of consciousness at times. There are a number of areas that need addressing, and I'm not sure science as it is well equipped to address such issues...labelling such things as woo woo because of this sloppy, lazy scientific reductionism. What is going on in veridical NDE's and OBE's? If NDE's are simply a REM based hallucination, why are people that experience them almost unanimously changed for the rest of their lives, often in a significant way? Why are shared visions on ayahuasca so common in Amazonia? What of the evidence for consciousness affecting random number generators, with incredibly vast odds this is not down to chance, with the ongoing study at Princeton University? What of Dr Michael Persinger's research of brains surrounded by magnetic fields in different rooms isolated from one another, sharing reactions when one experiences a visual input? What is going on with precognitive dreams? (I've had a few of these personally) What is going on with the perhaps millions of reported incidences of telepathy? The latter is something that is very tricky to study in a lab environment, so as a result tends to get thrown on the woo woo pile as a result.

We must be careful to be rational but at the same time be open and not fall prey to scientism. If even a single one of the previous phenomena is 100% verified and true (I think there will be numerous cases of each category, but again, hard to scientifically quantify) it at the very least hints that there is more to consciousness than your thinking would allow.

Interesting article relevant to the brain/mind discussion.

'Is Your Brain Really Necessary?'

http://www.rifters.com/r...les/Science_No-Brain.pdf

Could it be something to do with the perpetual running commentary of millions of neurons communicating information between each other regarding its environment and its ever changing connections and interactions. So yeah in effect the creator, receiver and transmitter.
This leaves the potential for consciousness to exist in multiple states one idea that keeps appearing in my thoughts is that conciousness is interaction itself whether that be a butterfly effect interaction or a direct interaction, meaning one 'thing' is in a certain position because of another and so on and so on so indirectly through the knock on effect of this one 'thing' means non-local 'thing' is concious of another 'thing' the other side of the universe indirectly through its interaction with local 'thing'.
One thing we do know is conclusions cant be drawn, we know so little and history has shown us that we are usually far from the seeing the full picture.

Because their receivers are not the same.. If you would actually open your mind and ponder this position a little bit more deeply you would see that as the obvious answer... and again I'm not saying your view is wrong.



You make it sound like it's ignorant to propose consciousness as a wave, and I imagine the first time people heard about light waves or electromagnetic waves, or gravity waves it seemed ignorant to.. and yet here were are long after the fact with math essentially proving that these things ARE waves with special eigenstates we can use to calculate static properties like resting mass of electrons...who never rest and are never actually particles.

Consciousness as a field is not such a leap to me at all. In fact consciousness is just a fancy word for higher level awareness and the entire universe is infused with awareness... trees are aware of the sun, bacteria are aware of chemical gradients, plants are aware of the sun (they turn to face it), animals (including humans) have a spectrum of awareness that is generated from our nervous system.. Our brains are highly adapted to process this 'awareness/consciousness' and because every brain is different and because brains also receive information in the form of sound, smells, touch, etc and these different events lead to radically different interpretations of this conscious field.

Nothing I've said breaks any of the current experiments related to consciousness. And nothing I've said is any larger a leep of faith then other ideas in science before they become adopted. Doesn't mean it's correct, but it's just as likely that consciousness is a field as it is that photons are, or that electrons are... it's literally everywhere to my eye's..but again I don't consider human consciousness anything more than a highly evolved level of awareness that we call consciousness to make ourselves distinct from other piece of the universe.




you keep belittling others like this. You making it sound like people proposing new ideas are simply invoking magic. Stop it's pathetic and quite frankly anti science. Disagree with people sure, but relegating to calling their views the invocation of magic.. was Einstein's theory of relativity the invocation of magic? In fact your whole stance here is that if the current experts can't see it then it must be magic is about as narrow minded and anti science as it gets to me. Scientists that hold these view petty much never advance science. It's the free thinkers that do...and yes they get a lot of things wrong and a lot of things correct, but they certainly don't make strides by adhering to the status quo.



So what. So called experts are the ones that are alway's wrong when a paradigm shift happens.. and BTW plenty of people that believe consciousness is s field are also experts studying this thing called consciousness.




yep DMT will affect your brain. Perhaps the simplest analogy is changing the station on a radio. Unless of course you really believe that piece of grey matter in your head is capable of generating infinity...


I'm not saying your wrong. In fact I can just as easily see the data as the brain generating consciousness.. Actually I prefer to see the brain as both a receiver and a generator. When I speak other brains in the room receive my stream of consciousness... My brain generated thoughts and other brains received them. You can call that magic if you want.. and use the label "hearing" to some how make it sound less magical, but in the end the universe working through me and others to make conscious a very non local process.

BTW Here are a few of the experts that believe consciusness is a field:

http://www.sciencedirect...le/pii/S1053810001905082

http://www.surrey.ac.uk/...20of%20Consciousness.pdf

http://www.unisci.com/stories/20022/0516026.htm

http://www.psychologytod...eld-theory-consciousness

Dr. Hameroff and Penrose have fascinating theories in this area. I wish I could find the thread on it here, because someone explained this complicated area in a very simple way.

http://www.quantumconsci.../quantumcomputation.html


It's a fallacy to argue that "the experts in the field are studying the brain for it, not the other way around...." and that therefore it must be so, as if all the experts agree on consciousness anyways. In fact many so-called "experts" actually hold personal ideas that in some way or another are at odds with the current paradigm but refrain from coming out of the closet because of how it could easily tarnish their careers. http://journal.frontiers...9/fnhum.2014.00017/full#


I'm still open to anything and haven't made up my mind but I find it confusing that everyone is unaware of the studies done that lend evidence to the idea of consciousness being non-local or at least having non-local properties. Most just assume there is none. I've outlined some of this in a few threads now (mostly ones on ESP), as there is quite a lot (some is in the link). Combine that with the vast databases of psychedelic experiences and the anomalies and synchronicities involved in that and you have something pretty peculiar imo.

@ shadow



Im no expert but I've studied neuroscience at some length. I was interested in selective attention. For example, the way the prefrontal cortex could modulate the amplitudes of P1 and N1 segments of EPRs within areas involved in sensory processing, be they auditory channels in dichotic listening tests or the occipital lobes in visual tests and so on. Attention is very interesting vis a vis consciousness because there is a sense in which there are degrees of consciousness which peak at the focal point of attention. There is clearly some awareness of stimuli at the periphery of vision for example, yet there are dozens of tests that show how unexpected stimuli can be missed in the periphery when attention is focused elsewhere. There is also the debate concerning whether neuronal responses to stimuli are suppressed outside of the focal area, or primed within the focal area, or some combination.

Nevertheless, all this kind of information ever shows is that there is some kind of structural coherence between mental events and brain events. It doesn't even address intentionality let alone other aspects of the infamous 'hard problem' which infest materialist "explanations" of consciousness. Earlier in this thread I saw that you ridiculed philosophers and I do think many (lay?) people who are taken by neuroscience suffer from being illiterate with regards to philosophy of mind. And it shows. You must be aware that the real scientific movers and shakers in neuroscience take philosophy seriously. Francis Crick and Cristoff Koch for example publish fascinating papers such as :

http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/SCBCFD.pdf

but qualify the extent of their 'theory of consciousness' here:

http://discovermagazine..../nov/whatisconsciousn149

"DISCOVER: But in what way are you defining consciousness?

KOCH: Well, let’s first forget about the real difficult aspects, like subjective feelings, because they may not have a scientific solution. The subjective state of play, of pain, of pleasure, of seeing blue, of smelling a rose--there seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level, of explaining molecules and neurons, and the subjective level. Let’s focus on those things that are easier to study--like visual awareness."

In the main, neuroscientists, if not the people who promote their work, are aware that there are potential limits to their endeavor that are serious and perhaps insurmountable.




I really don't think there is anything objective about consciousness. 'Objective consciousness' is an oxymoron afaik. If we debate whether computers could be conscious we are not asking whether computers could process and react to visual information because they obviously can. We are asking whether this processing and reaction would have a concomitant subjective and internal feel. And its that private and subjective feel that we equate to consciousness.

Excellent. Thanks for that.

On such a topic one is muddled by common usages, and by how we would change them and why simultaneously.
I lean toward the archaic notion that this subjective, this private desideratum exists everywhere. But more, that it is the basis of all motion, down to the most seemingly simplistic processing systems. Therefore extinguishing the novelty of the compound subjective-objective dilemma and of human 'consciousness'. Personally.

An apology is in order to --Shadow on account of me implying he was 'illiterate'. at least it could be taken that way, it wasn't meant like that, but could be understood that way. I read my post back and winced. Ouch! Me and my stupid ego, I wanted to be strongly worded and have come across looking like an ass. Of course, there isn't a person on these boards I would count as even approaching illiterate and certainly not --Shadow. My point was really just that there is some value in philosophy of mind particularly in discussions like these. So sorry --Shadow. I'll try to keep my mouth in check in future.

Can we please change the title of this thread from "Why Consciousness is Not the Brain," to something like: "Is consciousness the brain?" And maybe move it into the philosophy forum. This is hardly real science that's happening here.
It's hardly a forgone conclusion.

You guy should look into some of the research on the neuroscience of 'the self' (or 'the ego,' or 'the soul' or whatever).
Researchers have found that your sense of self involves at least two discrete piece of neurological hardware that give rise to different aspects of what we consider a unitary experience of being an 'I.'

The pre-reflective and the narrative selves originate in different places and operate on different time-scales. You can manipulate one, or the other, producing a host of interesting effects.

Imho, the whole idea of an "I,' is just a lie we tell ourselves.

Blessings
~ND

I think this thread is amazing.

it is an interesting thread.. there's certainly been a few of these at the nexus. i'm still interested in hearing shadow's response to some of the above comments and ideas?

..i stayed out of this thread, and enjoyed..
but my distillation of a few points of note:

- much of what is being referred to as 'consciousness', including in neuro-physiological studies, i would classify as 'cognition' or perception..changes in these do not necessarily reflect a change in the witnessing 'consciousness'..

-if consciousness was a scalar field, then there would be different values at different 'points', but the field itself would be non-local..

-would it be possible to make a computer programme 'conscious'..and if so, how would we prove it's conscious..?

-i agree with Nathaniel.Dread much of this thread is philosophy..but without an agreed definition or parameter/energy field to measure within science, philosophy is required..

...I wasn't going to post anymore... I don't know what more you want me to say on the topic acacian, other than try to appeal to rationality and reason.
Obviously there is so much more that we have to uncover about the brain and consciousness, but what we have uncovered about neuroscience over the last decade dwarfs most other current fields of scientific discover.

I know I come across as someone so certain that consciousness is this experienced 'packaged' in the brain, because I really do believe we have have now learn't enough in respective scientific fields to know we are at least on the right track studying 'consciousness being a manifestation in the brain due to neuronal activity, from a number of lobe areas and systems within the brain'.
All these pseudo-fantastical hypotheses about consciousness being external and universally connected to all other soul's by magical fairy strings just makes no logical or rational sense when you actually sit down and start asking probing scientific questions.

Look, even though there may still be so much to learn about animals, is there any new evidence I could show you that you would change your belief that pigs (or horses) could fly? Or it this already a closed topic as far as you're concerned, and probably a waste of time investigating the remote possibility that it could be true under very special conditions?

BTW - I don't mean to offend by my poor attempts at sarcastic humor here and there, I certainly haven't taken any offence to others opinion's on this thread. I'm not really emotionally invested in this topic, but nevertheless highly intrigued.

So starting... (specifically regarding consciousness), exactly how many discoveries to date have been made about consciousness, that do not involve the brain?


So what part of human anatomy were they studying to validate this science on lucid dreams etc, to open up new frontier of consciousness research?

Do you happen to know what these other frontiers of research are, and the scientific (or at least logical) argument for it's case supporting 'Why consciousness is NOT the brain"

@Acacian, you're making sense in a way that 'I know what you're trying to say'... It's the content of the argument that I'm finding doesn't make a great deal of sense to me. Saying that, I'm ALWAYS willing to change my mind based on new evidence.


Just for self clarity... when people use words such as "physical measurements" and "materialistic" , are we only talking about chemical synapses and not electrical? Because as I stated before, an action potential or "wave" is not a physical or materialistic component. I don't think we should be getting hung up on this point.


It 'could' do that.
It 'could' also excrete out of the pineal gland at death and converge into the aura of the spaghetti monster....(my sarcasm again) ....the problem is: there is not a snippet of evidence to suggest either of these cases, yet many rational reasons to suggest it doesn't. What would consciousness take over as it's energy source? This energy source would surely be measurable?



I would agree that it is BOTH, slightly different under different conditions., such as 'watching a cat' vs 'recalling the memory watching that cat'


Yes, the hippocampus being one of areas we have observed new neurons being recruited to facilitate learning.... but so what!?
You could give examples all day long of scientists making claims and refutes in the early stages of various scientific fields, later to be shown untrue. The 80's was several lifetimes of neuroscience ago. And let's be honest, when "It was thought we were born with a set number of brain cells", there were logical reasons to think so at the time.

..and nen, I believe with enough computing power, and very possibly within the next 50 years, computational neuroscience will have the ability to produce computers that are conscious, beyond simply "intelligent" - is there a need for us to develop computers to go beyond intelligent to conscious?
How would it be tested? Great question. Unfortunately each time I think of a test, I stumble with the very definition of consciousness... haha

I haven’t followed this thread closely, so excuse me if my observations/comments have already been covered.

If one accepts the “primacy of matter” paradigm, then it becomes very difficult if not impossible to defend the position that consciousness is not a product or epiphenomenon of the brain. It seems to me that many of the arguments in this thread for non-local consciousness don’t go far enough – they seem to accept the primacy of matter paradigm as a given, and then proceed to try to explain consciousness in physical terms (as a wave, a quantum-mechanical effect, etc.).

But before I bring up an obvious alternative to the primacy of matter paradigm, let’s take a step back and ask a very basic question (a question that has yet to be satisfactorily answered by scientists or philosophers!)

What is consciousness?

If consciousness is a simple awareness – the ability of an entity to sense and respond to its environment, then my house’s thermostat is conscious. It senses the temperature of my room and responds by activating or deactivating the heating/cooling system. I’m guessing that few would consider a thermostat to be conscious in the same way that we are.

If consciousness is a more sophisticated sensing and control system, then one might consider an autonomous motor vehicle to be conscious. It’s aware of its surroundings, its position, its velocity, etc. and is able to make fairly complicated decisions based on an analysis of the sensory data it receives. But is an autonomous auto conscious?

Some say that consciousness simply arises out of complexity – that if a system becomes complex enough in a particular way, then consciousness appears as an epiphenomenon. But I’d argue that every epiphenomenon can be traced back to more simple pre-existing, less complex phenomena.

For example, the “wetness” of water is often used as an illustration of an epiphenomenon arising out of an incredibly large number of interacting water molecules. Everyone can agree that a water molecule doesn’t have the property of “wetness”, yet a macroscopic quantity of water does. So where did the “wetness” come from? It doesn’t just appear out of complexity alone, but rather is the result of complex interactions of very basic properties of water – hydrogen bonds, electron orbits, etc. So if we call consciousness an epiphenomenon, then there must be more basic properties of matter that in a very direct, albeit complex, way lead to consciousness. What are those basic properties?

Assuming that consciousness arises out of complexity alone can lead to some very bizarre consequences:

It is possible to duplicate the behavior of electronic logic gates using hydraulics: water-filled pipes with valves. Of course, the basic elements of a computer built with plumbing pipes and valves would be massive and very slow, but in theory at least it could be constructed. So for anyone who claims that there will someday be a conscious computer, they are forced to concede that it’s possible to have a conscious collection of plumbing pipes and valves. In fact, they must concede that any system composed of anything that can emulate a digital computer, when sufficiently complex and properly designed, is conscious.

If I’m not mistaken a Turing machine can emulate any digital computer, and a Turing machine can be constructed out of a long roll of paper tape with 0’s and 1’s on it. So a roll of paper tape, when passed through a suitable (and very simple) reader/writer, and if sufficiently long and complex, will become conscious.

It seems that those who claim that consciousness arises out of complexity must accept that everything is potentially conscious, from brains, to computers, to plumbing pipes, to rolls of paper tape. (Panpsychism?)

Another problem with the whole consciousness debate is that it’s not possible to measure whether an entity is conscious. Of course, we can measure wakefulness and levels of brain activity, but the sort of consciousness we’re concerned with is a subjective phenomenon. A sophisticated computer may appear to be conscious and may claim to be conscious, but is that sufficient proof that it is? How can one measure a subjective phenomenon?

Moving on…

The “primacy of matter” paradigm is so thoroughly entrenched in the modern world that it’s hard for many to accept that there is no proof (and there never will be proof) that the belief in consciousness arising from matter is just that – a belief.

The experience of everyday consensus reality that we find ourselves in without a doubt follows strict rules, is persistent, coherent, stable, and seems very “real”. Yet what is there about this experience that proves our interpretation of it is accurate?

I often use the analogy of dreaming to help illuminate the primacy of consciousness paradigm – not because I believe reality is a dream, but because it’s convenient and relatable – everybody dreams and in the process creates convincingly realistic experiences on a regular basis (and all without drugs!)

Imagine having an exceptionally vivid dream, and in this dream you’re discussing consciousness with a friend. You ask your friend where she thinks consciousness originates from, and she points to her head, proclaiming that it all originates in the brain (she’s obviously a strict materialist). Your discussion continues for some time, trails off, and then you awake.

So what did you really experience? Was your friend actually present? Was she conscious? Did she have a brain? A body? A mind even? What did you experience that would suggest the encounter was anything less than “real”?

How can one determine the “true” nature of reality from inside reality?

Great posts gibran and mistltoe minx




You explained this very well...It's something that took me a while to actually realize.

"All I'm saying is that minerals are a rudimentary form of consciousness; whereas other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals." - Alan Watts

Gibran! wow.
I think I'm a panpsychist, non practicing. Dost not partook.

There is no dynamo or generator within the brain. It is a thick, long, intricate, regenerating plastic mass of conductivity. Of wires, essentially. So I don't understand the idea of it being a 'generator' of consciousness, if animal and man consciousness were anything but interrelated muscle networks contracting to achieve locomotion to achieve interaction. Conductivity of other muscle networks. Or, philosophically speaking, to be one frolicking among the many bags of meat. The brain is a hub, and taking materialist-scientific sentiment to the extreme, is essentially non-local. Being that the evidence was a matter of agreement.

I would measure the subjective as an overlap of memory, or entrapped time, over the objective or Now within a semi-closed system, or body of entrapped light. In terms of both quantity and utility of communications, or interrelated 'play'.

On a graph.. well there could be many graphs, depending on who's asking.

I have a question for NEN..

Confined to materialistic language (in your best cockney accent), how would you describe or expand the 'witnessing consciousness', as distinguishable from cognition?

Thank you for this. It's a whole new way of thinking about and approaching this problem for me. Will certainly spend some time churning this over in my mind and integrating it into my view.

These deep conversations are what I love the most about the nexus. We may not all agree, but you can pretty much bet that most of us have at least spent some real time thinking deeply about these things and can formulate a valid point.


Also Shadow, I apologize to you. My earlier post was a bit harsher sounding than I intended it. So please accept my apology in that regard

..yeah thought provoking post gibran…you've raised the bar..

thymamai wrote:

if you can tell me the rhyming slang for consciousness i'll buy you a drink..
but in materialist language! leave-it-out..haha
it's more like information theory..cognition generally means perceptions, process, sensations, thought etc..there are changing states of cognition..the changes can be gauged because there is a 'control', or reference, which does not change, at least in the same way (change can only be measured relative to something) ..this is what i mean by the 'witnessing' consciousness..the cognition (processing) is still information..the 'receiver' of the information is not the specific information itself..

however, we could say that the 'cognition' (everything being observed including thoughts) is an aspect or 'sub-platforms' of consciousness, as the recognition takes place through consciousness..the witnessing consciousness would not be the things cognized, nor dependent..would be not state specific, hence able to incorporate or experience any kind of possible cognitive state..it is the distinguisher of cognition..

enjoying thread, is good discussion..