Consciousness

[SpiritualBeing]

I see. I havent had those sufficiently to experience consciousness apart from the brain. You have?

Complete separation of consciousness from body and ego death. Absolutely terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

 

[durangodawood]

No, it's meaningless because there's no way to verify the validity of the claim.

The utility of anecdote depends on your personal relationship with the subject. It doesnt suit any sort of objective presentation. But it may be useful for you.

 

[durangodawood]

Complete separation of consciousness from body and ego death. Absolutely terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

How did that happen? Did you seek it?

 

[SpiritualBeing]

Except that they are.
It's a person making a bunch of claims about something or someone. About something that supposedly happened, or whatever.

It's just words.

Call it what you want. It is still evidence based upon the experiences or opinions.

They are, unless they have supportive evidence ;-)
At least, in terms of accuracy in reality. If the point of the story is to convey some "deeper meaning", to the point that wheter or not the story really happened is actually irrelevant, then it's not meaningless off course.




It is just a claim. A claim that can be false. You might be lying. You might be making up stuff as an excuse for why you are late, because you don't want to say that you really overslept.

More importantly, it's a claim that is easily checkable. For example, are you wet from the rain? What do the wheather records say?

If you saying that "the weather was such and such" is not a claim about the weather, then what the heck is it? It certainly isn't evidence that the weather was bad.

Your hair being a mess, your cloths being wet from rain and the streets being filled with rainpuddles.... THAT would be evidence of bad weather.

You claim the weather was bad, is just you making a claim.

The bad weather can easily be checked with evidence through new outlets reporting the weather, other people, or simply by walking outside and experiencing it yourself.

 

[SpiritualBeing]

How did that happen? Did you seek it?

It found me. Through plants. Maybe retained 5% of the experience it was so intense.

 

[durangodawood]

It found me. Through plants. Maybe retained 5% of the experience it was so intense.

Oh. Thats cool. Plants have helped me see things that ordinary consciousness obscures. But I'm not sure I've gone so far as to know my self could carry on apart from my body.

 

[SpiritualBeing]

Oh. Thats cool. Plants have helped me see things that ordinary consciousness obscures. But I'm not sure I've gone so far as to know my self could carry on apart from my body.

No not just cool. Life changing. Questioning reality. Imagine experiencing reality more real than this world. How do you expect, the unexpected? How do you describe the indescribable? How do you believe the unbelievable? And how do you question the unquestionably flawless intelligence of Gods mind?

 

[jayem]

Consciousness is a form of energy that caries information from the human mind to the human brain to produce human awareness.
Not sure what kind of radiation, but it's a form of energy that interfaces with the EM field of the brain to transmit information to our awareness.
Whatever the brain can handle.
Whatever the brain can decode.
That part that produces human awareness.
It’s specific.

I think it can become a uniform signal that could work for everyone, but everyone would have to share the same brain.

A universal brain.
We receive it once in our lifetime, but for those of us who believe in the resurrection, we receive it twice.
The metaphysical mind.
Because it's metaphysical.

Honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about. Carrying information from the human mind to the human brain? (Other than semantics, is there any difference between mind and brain?) Energy that interfaces with the EM field of the brain? The metaphysical mind? If this makes sense to you, you're welcome to it. To me it's jibber-jabber pretending to be scientific.

 

[Kylie]

The utility of anecdote depends on your personal relationship with the subject. It doesnt suit any sort of objective presentation. But it may be useful for you.

But if it is not objectively true, what use is it?

In my experience, things that are only subjectively true generally aren't true, and the people who claim that they are true are under some wrong impression.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Oh. Thats cool. Plants have helped me see things that ordinary consciousness obscures. But I'm not sure I've gone so far as to know my self could carry on apart from my body.

There are a wide variety of experiences that can be produced by messing with the various parts of the brain that process the sensations of location, orientation, self, bounds, agency, etc.

Depending on how they're affected, you can have an out-of-body experience, or feel your boundaries dissolve or extend until you become one with the universe, or lose your sense of self, or feel you're a tiny speck, or feel like you're being controlled, and so-on.

 

[Justatruthseeker]

Honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about. Carrying information from the human mind to the human brain? (Other than semantics, is there any difference between mind and brain?) Energy that interfaces with the EM field of the brain? The metaphysical mind? If this makes sense to you, you're welcome to it. To me it's jibber-jabber pretending to be scientific.

What problem with the EM field of the brain do you have?

https://mayfieldclinic.com/pe-eeg.htm

NIMH » Brain Stimulation Therapies

 

[durangodawood]

But if it is not objectively true, what use is it?

In my experience, things that are only subjectively true generally aren't true, and the people who claim that they are true are under some wrong impression.

I agree, so long as your caveat "generally" remains. I havent yet ruled out certain 'dimensions' of reality that can currently only be experienced rather than demonstrated.

 

[jayem]

What problem with the EM field of the brain do you have?

https://mayfieldclinic.com/pe-eeg.htm

NIMH » Brain Stimulation Therapies

The problem is that none of what the OP describes has any connection with reality. The neuronal activity in the brain does generate differences in electrical potential (voltages) which can detected on the scalp. That's what the EEG records. But these are miniscule--on the order of microvolts (millionths of a volt.) These must be greatly amplified just to produce a recordable waveform. And they pretty much only reflect cortical activity. The voltages produced by deeper brain structures, like in the midbrain and basal ganglia generally can't be detected by an EEG. And it's in these deeper brain regions where conscious awareness originates.

And the link on the brain stimulation technology is worlds away from the OP. These techniques require surgical placement of electrodes into various brain areas. Or in the case of magnetic stimulation, a device is directly placed on the scalp and pulsed magnetic fields are generated. It's a less invasive form of ECT (where a current is delivered to the brain through electrodes, triggering a seizure. Kind of like defibrillating the brain. But it can be effective in treating depression.) The OP is talking about some type of as yet undetected electromagnetic radiation, originating who knows where, which is apparently transmitted through the air to our brains and produces consciousness. Which is pure science fiction. Although...it does sound a little like the psychotic delusions of paranoid schizophrenics. Who often claim that their brains are being controlled by signals beamed in from space aliens.

 

[Kylie]

I agree, so long as your caveat "generally" remains. I havent yet ruled out certain 'dimensions' of reality that can currently only be experienced rather than demonstrated.

How can there be an interaction which cannot be demonstrated? If something is capable of producing any sort of change that we can experience, then there should be some way that this change can be measured.

 

[durangodawood]

How can there be an interaction which cannot be demonstrated? If something is capable of producing any sort of change that we can experience, then there should be some way that this change can be measured.

Any meaningful experience can create a change in your soul (and I dont mean soul in the supernatural sense). Sure we can register certain brain state correlates of that experience in an objective fashion. But we cannot measure the meaning. Yet there it is: real meaning.

 

[Kylie]

Any meaningful experience can create a change in your soul (and I dont mean soul in the supernatural sense). Sure we can register certain brain state correlates of that experience in an objective fashion. But we cannot measure the meaning. Yet there it is: real meaning.

Okay, care to define soul then?

And any meaning would seem to me to be a purely SUBJECTIVE thing, so we can't gain any objective meaning from it.

 

[Doveaman]

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him – but God has revealed it to us by His Spirit.” – (1 Cor 2:9-10).

The Spirit of God reveals information to our human awareness that the eyes and ears cannot see or hear.

“For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him?
In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” – (1 Cor 2:11).

Man also has a spirit that reveals information to our human awareness, just as the Spirit of God does.

“It is the spirit in man, the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding.” – (Job 32:8)

It is the spirit in man that gives us the ability to perceive information; to think and to understand.

The spirit in man, the spirit of the mind, is the power source that generates human consciousness.

This is why human consciousness cannot be scientifically understood; it is because human consciousness is a metaphysical form of energy generated by a metaphysical source that transmits information to our human awareness through the physical circuitry of the brain.

Scientists can only detect the firing patterns of the brain to establish a correlation between those firing patterns and our conscious experiences, but they cannot detect the metaphysical source that controls those firing patterns.

This is why scientists consider consciousness to be the “Hard Problem”. They have no idea how the physical brain can produce metaphysical consciousness.

Man is the combination of a human body/brain with a human spirit/mind that gave rise to human consciousness:

“The LORD God formed man [body/brain] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [spirit/mind], and man became a living [conscious] being.” – (Gen 2:7).

The human spirit/mind is the power source that generates human consciousness which gives us the ability to think, to understand and to be self aware.

The human brain is simply the physical circuitry through which information is transmitted from the spiritual mind to our human awareness so that we can have conscious human experiences.

 

[durangodawood]

Okay, care to define soul then?

And any meaning would seem to me to be a purely SUBJECTIVE thing, so we can't gain any objective meaning from it.

Yes, thats exactly what I said. Of course meaning is subjective. But its subjective and real. If you only admit objectively available things into "reality", then your reality is incomplete.

(Yeah "soul" probly carried too much baggage. For this discussion we could use "self" instead, I think).

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Any meaningful experience can create a change in your soul (and I dont mean soul in the supernatural sense). Sure we can register certain brain state correlates of that experience in an objective fashion. But we cannot measure the meaning. Yet there it is: real meaning.

The most promising interpretation is that meaning is the network of associations for some item of information. The associated concepts will be represented in the brain by particular patterns of neural activity.

In principle, it should be possible to monitor the patterns of activity accompanying the processing of information to reveal its meaning for that individual; of course, this does require a prior mapping of those patterns of activity to the concepts they represent.

I seriously doubt this will be feasible in practice because the pattern of activity corresponding to some meaningful concept will have, or consist of, its own network of associations, and so-on. But by monitoring the strongest nodes of activity for any given conceptual stimulus over many different concepts, a crude interpretation of meaning might be possible.

Just speculatin'.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

... meaning would seem to me to be a purely SUBJECTIVE thing, so we can't gain any objective meaning from it.

I think it might be possible to reconstruct a crude representation of meaning, just as someone can use language to crudely describe the meaning something has for them. We can never know how it feels for that individual to experience it, but we might be able to say what concepts and emotions are involved and to what extent.