Is Consciousness Solely a Product of the Brain?

[nismaratwork]

But in fact by breaking things apart in proper fashion, they become measurable. This is why good metaphysics underpins good science.

Good metaphysics?... Hmmm... I always thought of it as the cotton padding that makes the current state of affairs a comfortable seat until we're forced to change by reality.

So if we are modelling "consciousness" as the degree of top down constraint - the ability of the ant colony mind to control the ant colony's parts - then we can now measure that degree of "mindfulness".

There is no control, only group behaviour there, and the lack of mindfulness is demonstrable. Ants can and will eat themselves out of house and home (so to speak), and their behaviour form a rigid and unchanging set that are dependant on their specific environment.

And as you say, already you can see different degrees at work in different ant species. This proves the case rather than undermines it.

I'm confused here.

Biofeedback experiments for instance measure the degree of mindful control humans can exert over their own bodies. If the right feedback (local~global) interation is set up, then the answer is surprisingly great.

In some systems yes, but try to stop the system as a whole through feedback, or try to exceed normal tolerances...

But to accept this and then lapse back to a reductionist "the whole is the sum of its parts" rhetoric is unacceptable. It has just been demonstrated that it isn't.

Still not sure about that, I think you may be ignoring the larger system as being part of the parts in summation. Still, the rhetoric is useless, no argument there.

Which is where a proper theory of the epistemic cut between local and global scales of causality in complex adaptive systems becomes essential. Again, it is framing your understanding in operational constructs - crisp dichotomies that in turn can be crisply measured.

Yep, I love those, pity I only see them in science and not in philosophy. Phil is just to personal and ad hoc in my view, to dependant on the state of science for any sense of validity. In short, it's a fine smörgåsbord of secular religions and ideologies.

Reductionism isn't the way to banish unclear thinking here. Forcing people to adhere to terms with exact meanings (because those meaning have been formed as limits of a dichotomy) is the way to move forward scientifically. It creates a clear picture of what must be measured out in the world.

The universe seems to have a beef with clear thinking, and reductionism to some extent always seems to be the spur of progress in science, with philosophy trailing behind.

 

[nismaratwork]

Are you aware of cell differentiation in such cell colonies? A school of fish don't really exhibit differentiation, so yeah... a fish dying in the school wouldn't do much globally. But when there's a more intricate coupling between the members (as is the case in cell colonies) and differentiation occurs, then the functional role of the differentiated cells can become significant enough to where removal of those cells WILL lead to global dysfunction.




I would challenge that! This is a falsifiable question. From the implications of experiments that deprive sensory organs at birth, it seems intuitive to me that if you completely cut off all perception (yet somehow keep the organism nutritionally supplemented) it will not develop much of a consciousness at all.

It is through primitive reflexes as a newborn and perceptive feedback through development that self-consciousness seems to come about. Take away the perceptive feedback and you have a purely instinctual animal. So far, their sense of self is yet to be detected (as opposed to higher mammals... and particularly social animals)

But this, I think, would be a good question to see if anyone has tried to answer experimentally. We should wager a non-monetary bet on it ;)

Bet taken, but I doubt we'll ever know... the closest would be the "closet-girl" phenomenon, and it's a far cry from sensory deprivation.

Maybe Hellen Keller would be one example, but she did have touch...

 

[apeiron]

Bet taken, but I doubt we'll ever know... the closest would be the "closet-girl" phenomenon, and it's a far cry from sensory deprivation.

Maybe Hellen Keller would be one example, but she did have touch...

Keller had all her senses to the age of two.

There is a ton of research bearing on this question. For instance, sensory deprivation experiments show how the sense of self and structured awareness generally falls apart with a lack of a world to interact with and structure your experience.

 

[nismaratwork]

Keller had all her senses to the age of two.

There is a ton of research bearing on this question. For instance, sensory deprivation experiments show how the sense of self and structured awareness generally falls apart with a lack of a world to interact with and structure your experience.

Yes... and though traumatized and damaged, it can be re-established in many cases.

 

[apeiron]

Good metaphysics?... Hmmm... I always thought of it as the cotton padding that makes the current state of affairs a comfortable seat until we're forced to change by reality.

The best modern philosophy is done by scientists. You probably just been reading the wrong books.

There is no control, only group behaviour there, and the lack of mindfulness is demonstrable. Ants can and will eat themselves out of house and home (so to speak), and their behaviour form a rigid and unchanging set that are dependant on their specific environment.

What, all of a sudden you haven't heard of peak oil? C'mon.

You need to study the ant colony literature perhaps to see that there really is a collective "state of mind" that can be measured.

Just because its quicker, here is a cut and paste of a bit I wrote for a Reader's Digest publication some years back...

Individually, an ant is a rather dumb creature. But collectively, do they form a group mind? After all, an ant nest is almost one organism genetically, a single queen living with as many as a million daughters. And all those eyes and jaws are linked like brain cells in a network of interactions that can respond to the world with sharp intelligence.

Watch a trail of ants and they are forever bumping into each other, pausing to touch antennae. In every brief meeting they are exchanging information about what they are doing. Their tiny brains then apply some simple rules. If an ant finds it is rarely meeting another employed in the same task – or alternatively, too many others doing the same task – then it will switch to a different behaviour. So from nest maintenance to foraging, or patrolling to rubbish detail . In this way, ants spread themselves out across their territory, doing what needs to be done as if the colony were conscious as a whole.

Deborah Gordon of Stanford University, who studies Harvester ants in the Arizona desert, has even found that colonies develop more intelligence as they mature. A colony sticks to the same sized territory as it grows in number, so creating a web of interactions that becomes ever denser and smarter.

When Gordon set problems by blocking foraging trails or messing up the nest site with toothpicks, she found that mature colonies were quicker and more reliable in their response. Younger colonies were erratic in their behaviour as if they had not quite learned what to do. The older colonies had also discovered how to get along with their neighbours. If foraging trails happened to cross one day, next day the ants would head in the opposite direction. But adolescent colonies always returned looking for a fight.

So it is unlikely that a glow of awareness emanates from that trail of ants coming in your back door. But there is a collective intelligence at work. Each ant may be as dumb as an isolated brain cell. But the trail, like our brain, at some level “knows” the world.

Yep, I love those, pity I only see them in science and not in philosophy. Phil is just to personal and ad hoc in my view, to dependant on the state of science for any sense of validity. In short, it's a fine smörgåsbord of secular religions and ideologies..

Again, c'mon. What else was greek philosophy about than establishing the basic dichotomies of nature.

And again, the best modern philosophers are scientists first.

The universe seems to have a beef with clear thinking, and reductionism to some extent always seems to be the spur of progress in science, with philosophy trailing behind.

Reductionism works all the way up to the limits. But then fails radically in modelling the limits. So when it comes to the creation of universes, the nature of minds, the genesis of life, and the other most interesting questions, reductionism let's you down dramatically. And let's in all the crank mysterians because suddenly it seems "science can't answer".

 

[nismaratwork]

The best modern philosophy is done by scientists. You probably just been reading the wrong books.



What, all of a sudden you haven't heard of peak oil? C'mon.

You need to study the ant colony literature perhaps to see that there really is a collective "state of mind" that can be measured.

Just because its quicker, here is a cut and paste of a bit I wrote for a Reader's Digest publication some years back...





Again, c'mon. What else was greek philosophy about than establishing the basic dichotomies of nature.

And again, the best modern philosophers are scientists first.



Reductionism works all the way up to the limits. But then fails radically in modelling the limits. So when it comes to the creation of universes, the nature of minds, the genesis of life, and the other most interesting questions, reductionism let's you down dramatically. And let's in all the crank mysterians because suddenly it seems "science can't answer".

You're reaching. When it comes to the nature of the universe, minds, the genesis of life, it may well be that reductionism has more to offer. In the meantime mystics have their place, but it's a compliment to go so far as to add "physics" to the "meta". Just call it what it is, a placeholder, something to talk about and entertain ourselves with until science evolves to a point where it can answer such questions, or render them meaningless.

More likely we'll all be long gone before that happens, and a few thousand years of deep thought will be lost as well, and unlike science, will have only yielded some fun reads and chats. I prefer a nice solid laser, or steel, or a Penning Trap to the vagaries of metaphysics. Philosophy has a lot to offer, just not in the endlessly tail-chasing arena of the imponderables, where we simply reflect on the abject failure of the human mind to handle such weighty concepts.

I'd add, the best philosophers, like Einstein? Perhaps had he been less philosophically inclined he would have believed the ramifications of his early analysis that light is quantized. What is metaphysics except the proverbial "eunuch in the harem," cousin to the critic? Truly, it is a marginal thing, and while this is all good for the mind, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking it's more than our version of a hamster wheel.

edit: Allow me to quote a bright man I know, you may recognize him:

Tell that to the philosophers who railed against infinitesimals as the ghosts of departed quantities. Like Cantor's approach to infinity, what seems patently unreal as ontology has a strange way of becoming instead an ontological fact simply because an epistemological stance proves so effective.

 

[Ken G]

You're reaching. When it comes to the nature of the universe, minds, the genesis of life, it may well be that reductionism has more to offer. In the meantime mystics have their place, but it's a compliment to go so far as to add "physics" to the "meta". Just call it what it is, a placeholder, something to talk about and entertain ourselves with until science evolves to a point where it can answer such questions, or render them meaningless.

This is a standard take on metaphysics by scientists, but I'm not sure it is much more than wishful thinking. Basically, the idea is that science is some kind of inevitable journey, like Lewis and Clark seeking the Pacific, and all questions along the way are simply milestones to that progress. But it completely overlooks the possibility that many of the questions we'd really like answers to, including metaphysical ones which have considerable contact with science, are just plain not resolvable by science. To people outside science, like a painter or playwright or poet, that seems so obvious they couldn't even begin to understand how a scientist could have the hubris to imagine anything else. What we can all agree on is that, in facing the possibility that science simply does not answer certain questions, we can:
1) decide this is false, and science will answer all, eventually-- if humanity lasts long enough.
2) decide this is true, but only because those questions are ill-posed. It is not science's fault the question cannot be answered, it is the question's fault.
3) accept the premise as true, and get back to doing science for the things it was meant to do.

 

[nismaratwork]

This is a standard take on metaphysics by scientists, but I'm not sure it is much more than wishful thinking. Basically, the idea is that science is some kind of inevitable journey, like Lewis and Clark seeking the Pacific, and all questions along the way are simply milestones to that progress. But it completely overlooks the possibility that many of the questions we'd really like answers to, including metaphysical ones which have considerable contact with science, are just plain not resolvable by science. To people outside science, like a painter or playwright or poet, that seems so obvious they couldn't even begin to understand how a scientist could have the hubris to imagine anything else. What we can all agree on is that, in facing the possibility that science simply does not answer certain questions, we can:
1) decide this is false, and science will answer all, eventually-- if humanity lasts long enough.
2) decide this is true, but only because those questions are ill-posed. It is not science's fault the question cannot be answered, it is the question's fault.
3) accept the premise as true, and get back to doing science for the things it was meant to do.

That's a potential knock on science, but no endorsement for mysticism or metaphysics, anymore than it is for religion or blind faith.

 

[Pythagorean]

To paraphrase Galileo:

science is about error, not wisdom.

 

[nismaratwork]

To paraphrase Galileo:

science is about error, not wisdom.

Wisdom is overrated, just ask the alchemists and medieval barber/surgeons, priests, and others.

Errors can teach, wisdom is very much up for debate as to quality and quantity.

To paraphrase Galileo: "Hey, I'm telling the truth you zealots!"

 

[Pythagorean]

"Hey, I'm telling the [error] you zealots!"

:)

 

[pftest]

But consciousness is a spectacularly ill-defined term as people use it without any kind of partner concept at all. This is why pan-psychism is so easily believed, why souls or spirits seem so plausible. With no crisp boundaries to prevent us, we can spread a word like consciousness as far as we like. A bad term covers all cases because it carries no proper sense of what it is not.

Metaphysics depends on robust dichotomies, ones that carve up the terrain of possibility into precisely complementary alternatives.

Consciousness is a word defined by "what it is like to be", which is what makes it so useless (except for perpetuating mysteries). To be any use, it would have to be clearly defined in terms of what it is not.

With the definition given in this post, i think everyone will understand what is meant with the term. Its opposite would be a state of unconsciousness, where no experience is present. If i have to refer to something familiar to make it clear, one might think of being asleep or under anesthesia.

 

[apeiron]

With the definition given in this post, i think everyone will understand what is meant with the term. Its opposite would be a state of unconsciousness, where no experience is present. If i have to refer to something familiar to make it clear, one might think of being asleep or under anesthesia.

OK, 1) so unconsciousness is a lack of experience. And you claim that is not a tautological definition? Or are consciousness and experience different in some important way?

And 2) if being asleep or anaesthetised renders you unconscious, lacking in experience, then what is different in the you that is asleep/anaesthetised from the you that is awake and conscious? I mean how do I know the difference? What is it about your terminology that points to something I can measure?

And 3) how does the very fact that you are unconscious when asleep/anaesthetised gell with a panpsychic view of consciousness? Do you think some property of your atoms has altered? Again, what is the mechanism that makes a difference? What should I be measuring according to the terminology you wish to employ?

 

[pftest]

I believe that the loss of self, and joining with something MORE including others around them is not believable except as a valid internal experience. The event seems to provide no information that would not be present, merely a new perspective that COULD be found through other means. In short, if you feel at one with the universe, and the universe (including the people around you) don't experience you as being one with anything, I stick with the empirical angle.

If you (to quote a friend of mine who ate 'shrooms) are on a journey, but nobody else is involved and you come back with no more than when you left, it was an inwardly directed event, not

I would not expect someone with impaired brainfunction (and a distorted sense of self) to experience the same as with unimpaired brainfunction. And i would not expect others with unimpaired brainfunction to experience what someone with impaired brainfunction experiences. The other people do not report a distorted sense of self it precisely because their brains are functioning as normal.

 

[pftest]

OK, 1) so unconsciousness is a lack of experience. And you claim that is not a tautological definition? Or are consciousness and experience different in some important way?

And 2) if being asleep or anaesthetised renders you unconscious, lacking in experience, then what is different in the you that is asleep/anaesthetised from the you that is awake and conscious? I mean how do I know the difference? What is it about your terminology that points to something I can measure?

My definitions merely refer to our experiences in order to make one understand what is being talked about. Because all definitions ultimately refer to our experiences, if you accept any other definition of anything else, it means you are familiar with experiences. All definitions are ultimately circular because of the limited vocabulary of languages.

And 3) how does the very fact that you are unconscious when asleep/anaesthetised gell with a panpsychic view of consciousness? Do you think some property of your atoms has altered? Again, what is the mechanism that makes a difference? What should I be measuring according to the terminology you wish to employ?

One of the options is that it is merely a memory disruption: you were conscious but you don't remember it. Or in such a way that it has no relation to the everyday state of mind.

Both anecdotes of unconsciousness and non-brain consciousness can be interpreted differently and are not in anyway proof of a metaphysical position.

 

[ideasrule]

One of the options is that it is merely a memory disruption: you were conscious but you don't remember it. Or in such a way that it has no relation to the everyday state of mind.

The former seems implausible. Why would the conscious person not try to communicate? Has their brain lost the ability to control the body? The latter is pretty much unfalsifiable until we identify exactly how consciousness manifests physically, in which case we can simply do a brain scan.

 

[pftest]

The former seems implausible. Why would the conscious person not try to communicate? Has their brain lost the ability to control the body? The latter is pretty much unfalsifiable until we identify exactly how consciousness manifests physically, in which case we can simply do a brain scan.

Yes it is unlikely that the person has a completely normal human state of mind with just a memory problem. But a memory problem combined with an altered state of mind is not so unusual. This is what happens with dreams for example. Locked in syndrome, strokes, etc. When brainfunction is impaired this can distort the sense of self, memory, language, the ability to communicate, control the body, motivation, and basically any other of our mental faculties.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

I haven’t read the paper (problem with links) but have read some like it, and some of Strawson, and hope I have some gist of it.

In that assumptions are possibly mistaken, I like that ideas expressed in the OP challenge some assumptions. I also like that it seems to rely upon fewer, possibly mistaken, assumptions than some other ideas and is elegant and I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read. One assumption relied upon here would be that logic holds, which I think JDStupi mentions.

The contradiction lies on the law of the excluded middle, and you are saying that something cannot by definition emerge from its opposite, for that would be a logical contradiction. Now we have a number of important tangent questions. Among them are "Can we use logical conclusions to make ontological conclusions?" and the related question "Is it not we who define the terms and use the logic?". So you see, my skepticism lies deeper in the application of the style of argumentation itself. While the law of contradiction may logically (or ontologically) hold true, it is we who create the distincition between opposites and so the choice of what is opposite is, to some degreee, arbitrary.

Regarding the idea itself, reading from the start, JDStupi’s initial response was something similar to what I considered too, so I’ve just read along these lines for now.

“So it seems that we simply use the word "Experience" as a designator for all that exists, such that it loses its meaning. We have just attached a new word that doesn't offend our logical sensibility to "fundamental reality", but as far as explanation goes we seem to have done nothing.”

So, if experience is everything then saying “experience” would be as meaningful as saying “everything is everything”. From what I have read, I don’t think Strawson argues that experience is everything. I think instead, Strawson describes himself as an “experiential-and-non-experiential-monist”. This would be in line with the “pile” analogy, and with the idea that experience lies on a continuum of dilution and strength, as it would seem "experience" would need to be diluted with something other than experience. Strawson argues that the “monist” label can still be applicable. So, I think in this argument experience and non-experience, by constituting and opposing each other, are both internal and external to each other. Was this sort of thing described as circular?

On another note, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read very much, but may have missed exactly how the title is related, especially as there seems to be more discussion by Strawson of information rather than explicitly creation or causation? Maybe the links I did read didn’t deal with that.

(Pftest, some time ago I struggled to find the words to express my view in a thread. You posted a better expression which I quoted. I don’t think we’ve crossed paths since so thanks, belatedly.)

 

[Pythagorean]

@nismar,

Put it this way. Do you think the words you use or the way you use them are completely your own? Do you think the skepticism you practice was your own idea? You are part of a collective consciousness and it does its work through you. You have your differences; minute emphasis differences in the information that was conveyed to you (that can lead to different conceptualizations).

Or what about when you're out in social situations and you change your behavior to adhere to the customs and standards of your company?

All of these are examples of outgoing information, not spawned from inside, but processed by the inside. It's information that, at one time, flowed from the outside as you watched, learned, and interacted throughout your past.

In early man, the first symbols themselves arose from nature (tracks in the snow, the profile of a buffalo on the horizon). Significant information flowing in.

Of course, I am not down-playing the internal forces (the genetic expression, the connectome shuffling) but these too were once only a homogenous neutronium before the stars compressed them into molecules that somehow found themselves oscillating around in a pattern based on the driving forces of nature present at abiogenesis (the primitive stimuli).

So as far or near as one goes back, the system was rather bland without the rich, exotic dynamics... the external forces that drive the system. It's through the interaction between the external forces and the internal forces that organism individuality is defined (otherwise monozygotic twins would be the same person) and as a society becomes more sophisticated and ordered, the newborn members of that society begin to receive more precise, unified external forces. We become more synchronized (note that many mammals are already synchronized through pheromone networks; not all the information that synchronizes us is handled by computations we're conscious of).

 

[nismaratwork]

@nismar,

Put it this way. Do you think the words you use or the way you use them are completely your own? Do you think the skepticism you practice was your own idea? You are part of a collective consciousness and it does its work through you. You have your differences; minute emphasis differences in the information that was conveyed to you (that can lead to different conceptualizations).

No, a collective consciousness in the sense that its spoken of in literature (and Jungian theory) wouldn't require that I learn skepticism, but that it's imparted through group experience. The collective unconscious or collective consciousness angle just kicks the can down the road, offering no new insight in my view. I learned through trial and error, interaction with people, and my own thoughts to arrive at the point I'm at today. The words are symbolic conventions I share with some portion of the population, passed down yes, but hardly collective in a grand sense.

We're a distributed consciousness that desperately tries to preserve more than base instinct.

Or what about when you're out in social situations and you change your behavior to adhere to the customs and standards of your company?

All of these are examples of outgoing information, not spawned from inside, but processed by the inside. It's information that, at one time, flowed from the outside as you watched, learned, and interacted throughout your past.

Fair enough, but how is this relevant?

In early man, the first symbols themselves arose from nature (tracks in the snow, the profile of a buffalo on the horizon). Significant information flowing in.

Of course, I am not down-playing the internal forces (the genetic expression, the connectome shuffling) but these too were once only a homogenous neutronium before the stars compressed them into molecules that somehow found themselves oscillating around in a pattern based on the driving forces of nature present at abiogenesis (the primitive stimuli).

All of the common origins and commonalities in the universe won't cause a system of discrete macroscopic entities to somehow collapse into a gestalt. My origins do not mean that previous iterations of me are somehow equally conscious, or a part of me in anything except the most fanciful and artistic sense. Yes, we're all stardust, but the arrangement matters, the flux or lack matters, the ability to produce a universal signal of "on/off" at will matters.

So as far or near as one goes back, the system was rather bland without the rich, exotic dynamics... the external forces that drive the system. It's through the interaction between the external forces and the internal forces that organism individuality is defined (otherwise monozygotic twins would be the same person) and as a society becomes more sophisticated and ordered, the newborn members of that society begin to receive more precise, unified external forces. We become more synchronized (note that many mammals are already synchronized through pheromone networks; not all the information that synchronizes us is handled by computations we're conscious of).

Again, we're back on familiar ground; nature and nurture both play an important role, and the complexity is hard for us to track... no argument there, but it doesn't act in support of your other points. Still, I agree.

 

[Pythagorean]

No, a collective consciousness in the sense that its spoken of in literature (and Jungian theory) wouldn't require that I learn skepticism, but that it's imparted through group experience. The collective unconscious or collective consciousness angle just kicks the can down the road, offering no new insight in my view. I learned through trial and error, interaction with people, and my own thoughts to arrive at the point I'm at today. The words are symbolic conventions I share with some portion of the population, passed down yes, but hardly collective in a grand sense.

We're a distributed consciousness that desperately tries to preserve more than base instinct.

I do not know much Jung, admittedly, but I don't know what you mean by "grand sense". I know Durkheim:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_consciousness

In which the skepticism you practice is simply doing what you're taught. From my point of view, I'm practicing skepticism about the idea of an isolated self, either objectively or subjectively, and I'm doing as I'm taught as well. We're not perfect, we practice skepticism based on our common sense... or our "collection of prejudices acquired by age 18" as Einstein would call them. These prejudices vary from town to town, subculture to subculture.

We have to use logic to overcome common sense. In doing so, we conform to yet another "collective conscious". Scientific method and skepticism are examples of the collective consciousness I speak of. No individual person has the insight or omniscience to hold the "truth" about the universe; we chip away at each other's ideas in science until the most objective statements are what's left behind. And even then, if we had a larger body of peer-review, there would be more chipping and more objectifying. Depending on how much disparity there is between the author's field and the reviewer's field, different aspects of the idea will be chipped at. Sometimes, chipping will occur out of ignorant skepticism. Look at what emerges: a brilliant display of a collective body that draws you and I as students of science.

Fair enough, but how is this relevant?

Perhaps you're searching for mysticism in my definition of collective conscious? I'm talking about an information network that holds very complete ideas that each individual of the network has only a fraction of a grasp of. As an example: not just the body of scientific knowledge, but the way of thinking that allows the body to exist in the first place; the "wave of reason" itself. We keep each other in check, acting as individuals, but we do so according to how the group determines.

And we like this kind of interaction, making democracy a popular choice for politics; our head of management of the collective conscious. They work to sway the collective consciousness of the "mob". So democracy becomes about absorbing people's minds into your collective so that they will empower you (through our voting system, a way to measure the collective consciousness in an effort to look like you care what the people think) to absorb more people into their collective consciousness.

And then you have strong polarizations, like dems vs. reps. Do you really think all of these people arrive at the conclusion of what political party they wanted to follow through personal exploration of self? Or do you think it had a great deal to do with their biology and their upbringing?

All of the common origins and commonalities in the universe won't cause a system of discrete macroscopic entities to somehow collapse into a gestalt. My origins do not mean that previous iterations of me are somehow equally conscious, or a part of me in anything except the most fanciful and artistic sense. Yes, we're all stardust, but the arrangement matters, the flux or lack matters, the ability to produce a universal signal of "on/off" at will matters.

I've read about Gestalt theory. I don't even know what you mean by "collapse into a gestalt" or "previous iterations of me".

But if you're denying that your genetic and stimulus history is a part of you, that's an interesting claim considering what behavior science says...

Again, we're back on familiar ground; nature and nurture both play an important role, and the complexity is hard for us to track... no argument there, but it doesn't act in support of your other points. Still, I agree.

How it supports my point is that both "nature" and "nurture" represent distinct histories of events. Both forms of event can be pervasive. Giant events that effect everyone at once in the similar ways: The motion of the planets drives our circadian rhythm, gigantic events like earthquakes and volcanoes become extremely significant to everyone in the vicinity at the same time for the same reasons. Speciation, differentiation, and phenotypes are the "nature" example of a pervasive collective event within organisms.

 

[apeiron]

Perhaps you're searching for mysticism in my definition of collective conscious? I'm talking about an information network that holds very complete ideas that each individual of the network has only a fraction of a grasp of. As an example: not just the body of scientific knowledge, but the way of thinking that allows the body to exist in the first place; the "wave of reason" itself. We keep each other in check, acting as individuals, but we do so according to how the group determines.

So what's your next step when you correctly realize that "you" are socially-constructed - even down to the very way you think and reason? It is not just about your beliefs and attitudes but even your habits of "logic".

 

[Pythagorean]

I agree. I believe I alluded to this in my third paragraph.

As to the next step, I don't know. It's something I'm only beginning to appreciate. I have to work slowly through the history of what's already been thought about (returning again to the collective conscious of my new subculture).

 

[Pythagorean]

I guess subjectifying logic itself might be a next step.

 

[Forestman]

The important part to read is the nine lines of evidence.

http://www.evidenceoftheafterlife.com/

 

[Forestman]

Victor Zammit is a really cool guy.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

In post #118, I made a mistake writing “links”, I meant what I read of Strawson which wasn’t linked, e.g.

http://cognet.mit.edu/posters/TUCSON3/Strawson.html

“One can simply declare oneself to be a experiential-and-non-experiential monist: one who registers the indubitable reality of experiential phenomena and takes it that there are also non-experiential phenomena. I nominate this position for the title realistic monism.”

And I think reading on through the thread, Ken G answers my question about the word “create”.

I think pftest is making a basic point about language, which is actually very important to recognize because language is all we have here. Langauge involves hanging labels on things, but what are these "things"? They are the only things we are in any position to hang labels on: shared experiences. Period, that's what language is, hanging labels on experiences that we (assume we) share. So we cannot actually label the object "table", all we can label are the shared experiences we have around that object. This is quite important when we come to physicalism, and the OP question of whether or not a brain "creates" consciousness.

Both brain, consciousness, and create, are words, so can be nothing but hanging labels on shared experiences. We are looking for connections between these shared experiences, to make sense of them. Just like with cause and effect, we are looking for basic relationships, and also just like with cause and effect, we cannot actually demonstrate that the cause "creates" the effect, all we can say is the former gives us a way to make sense of the appearance of the latter, given that we experience things in temporal order. Using precise language like that saves us from making wrong terms based on assumptions we have made that we cannot actually demonstrate are true, and the same holds for claims that brains create consciousness, or are the "source" of consciousness, whatever we imagine a "source" is.

I was wondering whether it was suggested that brains invent (new) experience from discovered (already existing) information, or some other suggestion, given the idea involves a broad range of existence being both information and experientialists, and has a monist nature.

 

[King Wildog]

It seems perhaps in the question, too many things are undefined and unstated. Every happening will be due to availability, location, timing, potential difference, etc. All beings, then, would have to be questioned in their decision capability, so you are left with an incomplete question in that you must ask "conscious of what?" So it seems consciousness itself is defined case by case and that "conscious of what?" is always needed in that definition. Do you, pehaps mean "conscious of self"?

 

[rogerl]

Guys. Is it already categorically that all the mind function is emergent of the brain? Or is there some part of the mind that is beyond biochemistry and biology?

If your answer is maybe it is possible some part of the mind is beyond biochemistry and biology and perhaps our brain is just antennae to a mind somewhere via the microtubules or some hidden biophysics. It is possible parapsychology has any possibility? Or are you categorical that all of parapsychology is all fraud? If so, why? Is it because it violates lorentz invariance? That is, if the mind is outside the brain and it can move in space and time anywhere. It violates special relativity. So is Special Relativity and Lorentz Invariance the primary reason we categorically reject any claim of parapsychology and so repulsed by it that our blood pressure rise up the moment we hear the word and become so angry, etc.?

 

[Forestman]

The second link is all about the study in the Netherlands on NDE's.

http://www.ndelight.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117&Itemid=63

http://lkm.fri.uni-lj.si/xaigor/slo/znanclanki/neardeat.htm

 

[Forever]

To bad there is so extremely little research in out of body experiences.

 

[Forestman]

There has been a lot of research done, it has just not been done through the university system. And mainly because they won't do it. Any person or group can do the scientific method. The university system doesn't hold any monopoly on scientific truth. The evidence is out there, and has been gained by scientific means, but you are not going to find it in a main stream scientific journal, except for rare cases. Like the study in the Netherlands for example.

 

[Ken G]

The second link is all about the study in the Netherlands on NDE's.

http://www.ndelight.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117&Itemid=63

http://lkm.fri.uni-lj.si/xaigor/slo/znanclanki/neardeat.htm

Memory lapse was the first idea that popped into my head on that second paper, I wonder how those authors could have overlooked it.

 

[Calrid]

I think the best answer to this is that brains do in fact create consciousness but they are reliant on more than just that to be a coherent picture, whilst this does not invite dualism into the equation at all it does make for a more coherent picture of consciousness. Consciousness is an iterative process based on feedback from x that is not necessarily a part of the brain. Like evolution relies on the environment, conscious evolution does too.

 

[Calrid]

The second link is all about the study in the Netherlands on NDE's.

http://www.ndelight.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117&Itemid=63

http://lkm.fri.uni-lj.si/xaigor/slo/znanclanki/neardeat.htm

I find NDE experiments are really not that robust. Firstly they can be induced without being near death and secondly they are often plagued with interpretation issues.

I attended a lecture on this from a student at Cambridge who had created all the experiences associated with NDEs by using chemicals. NDE may be a practical evolutionary solution to cope with the fear of death, it is hard to say if it is more than that, so the conclusions become moot. It may only be fairly ubiquitous because like belief in God we have evolved to be open to religious social induction because of the way our brains have evolved in groups by a long term social conditioning that may well be instinctive now too. After all how do instincts form if not by reiterative learning processes that slowly become intrinsic.

A good example is that certain forms of epilepsy in the frontal cortex invoke religious hallucinations even in atheists, some of which can be extremely disturbing. How would this be possible if there wasn't a propensity to be religious in the first place inherent somewhere? What we need to know is what is the reason for this and is it more than just evolution. I suspect not but then not being religious I am biased.

 

[Forestman]

Calrid, was the drug that was used to induce NDE elements ketamine? I don't feel that inducing NDE with drugs invalidates their being objectively real at all. If the brain and the mind are two separate things then it would be natural that some drugs would mimic what is going on in the brain near death, thus causing the mind and brain to separate. There is more than one way to interpret the data. For example, ketamine acts similar to chemicals that are released near death that protect the brain from and overload of glutamate. Even LSD can sometimes cause NDE's. IMO these drugs act as a gateway. Never the less I don't feel that people should take them. Simply being because they fry your brain in the process of making it open to higher forms of information. What convinces me is not the tunnel, light, and heaven or hell, but the information gained while a person has a OBE, and also people being able to feel other peoples emotions during their life review. If it were not for this I would believe that NDE's were merely a hallucination.

I am not religious either.