Is Consciousness Simple or Complex?

[Ryan_m_b]

Of course, the brain is important, it must be?
However, there is an increasing body of empirical evidence that contradicts the "brain as the ultimate seat of consciousness" hypothesis:

- There are many known cases like the one reported here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12301-man-with-tiny-brain-shocks-doctors.html in which a normally functioning human (education, job, family, social skills) turns out to have just a fraction of the brain tissue compared to other normally functioning humans.
- A patient has recently been observed who has severe brain damage in all the brain areas that neuroscience has identified as important for consciousness and cognition who is still able to pass the famous "mirror test":
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0038413#pone-0038413-g001
- it is known that in cases of severe epilepsy in children (younger than about 8) removing one entire hemisphere will yield (after revalidation) no noticable impairments later on in life.

Welcome to the forums. Cases like this are examples of how adaptive the brain is, over time different areas can take on functions previously lost.

So the brain alone may not be enough to explain the complexity of consciousness, but is a leg important? There have been reports of patients who had limbs amputated (if I recall correctly especially when the hands were concerned) who "forgot" certain specialistic actions they were able to perform very proficiently before the amputation (f.i. Professional motor skills like those of a musician or locksmith) in the sense that they could not remember nor imagine perfoming the action.

Disciplines of the behavioural sciences who are concerned about the role of the body, nervous system and the environment in the emergence of complex adaptive behaviour are ecological psychology and embodied embedded cognitive science. If anyone is interested I can elaborate on what they would have to say about the subject.

Those sound like pseudo-scientific anecdotes. If there is any change after amputation it is likely do to the psychological stress of the event, not because memories have been kept in the limb.

 

[FredoX]

Welcome to the forums. Cases like this are examples of how adaptive the brain is, over time different areas can take on functions previously lost.

Thanks, these are very interisting forums indeed.

The examples I used sure are examples of brain plasticity! But to me they raise the question what you can learn about consciousness by studying the cytoarchitecture of area V1 when people can be conscious and cogent if it is removed altogether? In your answer also lies a question... If a function can be lost and then taken over by other areas... Where resides this function? It cannot be located exclusively in the piece of brain that was lost, how else can you recover it?

Also take into account that the patients in which the head contains more liquid than brain tissue, loss of brain tissue is so extreme there is no "other", healthy area that can take over. Moreover, there is no dramatic loss of function that prompts the discovery of these cases they are often accidental discoveries. So these examples are not exactly the same as recovery of function after acute acquired brain damage.

Those sound like pseudo-scientific anecdotes. If there is any change after amputation it is likely do to the psychological stress of the event, not because memories have been kept in the limb.

If by anecdotal pseudo-science you mean that no experiments can be found in the literature in which people have been deliberately amputated to answer this question you are right :)
I must admit I cannot find the paper I was referring to right now, but here is a much more recent study in which it is shown that motor imagery, imagining a movement or action sequence is impaired in amputees (and f.i. not in immobilized patients) http://nnr.sagepub.com/content/23/5/449.short

[edit just to be sure: I am not suggesting there are memories stored in the limb, just that memories / function are not stored in the brain as if it were an information database]

 

[Noja888]

Why not think of the brain in a quantum sense? This still makes it a physical object but allows for much more possibilities. Entaglement, qubits and such. The quantum landscape emerges into the classical existence we experience with our classical senses. Yet the definition of conciousness eludes us, interpretations thru history are always in the classical physics sense. Perhaps humans have been using the wrong set of tools in an attempt to explain this great question of wonder?