Originally posted by sage
Fliption,why do say brain has something to do with it and not that it has everything to do with it? We have seen that processes occurring within the brain has a direct relation to our consciousness. We have not yet seen any other phenomenon that has anything to do our being conscious. So the most plausible hypothesis is that these processes occurring within the brain are the only things responsible for our consciousness. Until any evidence to the contrary comes our way that is.
gaspar, I only said that consciousness in creatures with brains can be explained as a set of electrochemical processes occurring within their brains. We do not need anything else in this case. Your claim is interesting but needs proof, as I have said earlier. I am only refuting the claim that supernatural phenomenon are needed to explain consciousness in humans.
There are schools of thought that offer the POSSIBILITY that "consciousness" may be a FUNDAMENTAL feature of the Universe.
I was recently directed to a series of articles by a fellow poster -- ahkenaten, to be precise -- that discuss this philosophy, dubbed "Panpsychism".
One article in particular -- "Consciousness, Information and Pansychism" by a William Seager, at the University of Toronto -- presents certain lines of thinking that draw some to this view.
Although purely
philosophical , such thinking is supported by findings in Quantum Mechanics...as well as other areas of scientific thought.
Since I cannot hope to summarize the article in one post, I will only attempt to address one avenue of thought. Seager calls it the "generation problem".
"The hard problem of consciousness...is explaining why and how experience is generated by certain particular configurations of physical stuff." In other words, where in the chain of biological development does experience (aka consciousness) emerge?
"A theory of consciousness, Seager asserts, "ought to tell us what consciousness is, what things in the world possesses it, how to tell whether something possesses it and how it arises in the physical world." He gives an example of the honey bee which "acts like a creature that has experiences (visual olfactory, as well as painful and pleasurable)...(but) on which side of the fuzzy line betweeen sentience and nonsentience does the bee reside?"
The question asked is "which level (of function) is the appropriate level of description (of counsciousness) and who decides?
Seager discusses certain experiments in physics -- the quantum eraser and the basic two-slit experiment -- as demonstrating that "there is a noncausal, but
information laden (his ital) connection amongst the elements of a quantum system...Here, perhaps, we find a...highly significant sense in which information is truly a fundamental feature of the world (maybe the fundamental feature)."
The article also references the Thomas Nagel (1979), who suggests that "if consciousness is not reducible then we cannot explain its appearance at a certain level of physical complexity merely in terms of that complexity and so, if it does not
emerge at these levels of complexity, it must have been already present at the lower levels."
Thus, others have led themselves to the theory/proposition of Panpsychism, which is the doctrine that all matter -- systems great, small and singular -- have an aspect of consciousness to it.
It may be "bad science" but its "good philosophy"...I think.
)...but I don't have time now to see if I even make sense to MYSELF !
