Consciousness

[durangodawood]

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'.

I think the above may never get us past the map/territory distinction. Sure, at some point we may be able to identify on the mental map: "that signifies San Francisco". But will it ever be the same as experiencing just one single moment of actual San Francisco?

 

[DogmaHunter]

What makes it bizar to you?

If 3 is true, then all consciousness is finite which means non-consciousness is infinite. The ratio of finite to infinite is 0, which means our finite consciousness is equal to 0 or nothing. That's problematic.

That entire sentence is bizar. It's pure word salad. It doesn't mean anything. It reads like a bunch of smart-sounding english words strung together while pretending it is a sensible sentence.

 

[DogmaHunter]

Nope.

Yes.

I have observed brains. Both living and non-living once.
Whenever I observe cosciousness, it is being produced by a living brain. Never a dead brain. Never no brain at all.

Furthermore, clearly consciousness is also influenced by brain state and brain damage.

ALL the evidence points to brains producing consciousness and nothing else.

It's like saying that consciousness is transmitted through the brain, and not created by the brain.

Give me your best piece of evidence to support this.

The brain is just the receiver of information that is being transmitted to our human awareness.

Give me your best piece of evidence that "human awareness" exists as a seperate entity from the brain.

 

[Kylie]

“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.

I asked you to define it, not give me some vague statement about what it does.

“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.

Same thing. This is not what I asked for.

“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.

Once again, this sounds like the sort of vague claim you'd find on the latest fad exercise machine that doesn't actually do anything.

It also directly contradicts what we see in reality. There have been many cases of people who receive brain injuries and their personality changes radically. This indicates that a person's consciousness is directly related to their brain structure, not some vague, ill-defined concept of soul that exists separately to our bodies.

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.

Science has done quite a bit to determine what parts of the brain are responsible for what parts of our consciousness.

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.

You are engaged in circular logic. You are assuming that the source is metaphysical in order to claim that it is metaphysical.

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

Would you care to define metaphysical in this context and demonstrate to me that consciousness falls into that category?

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).

Claims from the Bible aren't going to convince me that those claims are correct.

Also, you haven't demonstrated that "breath of life" means spirit, nor have you demonstrated that "living" means conscious. There are, after all, many living things that AREN'T conscious.

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.

You have provided no evidence from reality to demonstrate that this claim is correct.

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.

You have provided no evidence from reality to demonstrate that this claim is correct.

 

[Kylie]

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).

Subjective things can be real, I agree. I think Star Trek is a great TV show. That is my subjective opinion, and it is a fact that I hold that opinion. But there are many people out there who hold the exact opposite opinion, that Star Trek is a terrible show. Yet I can't say that my opinion is the real opinion and theirs in unreal. Their opinion is just as real as mine. So anything that is subjective can't give us any accurate information at all about the real world, only our interpretation of it.

So any meaning that we get from a change in our soul (whatever that means) can't possibly be taken to be accurate information about the real world. It can only be taken as a reflection of our own personality. It can't give any actual truth about the world.

 

[durangodawood]

Subjective things can be real, I agree. I think Star Trek is a great TV show. That is my subjective opinion, and it is a fact that I hold that opinion. But there are many people out there who hold the exact opposite opinion, that Star Trek is a terrible show. Yet I can't say that my opinion is the real opinion and theirs in unreal. Their opinion is just as real as mine. So anything that is subjective can't give us any accurate information at all about the real world, only our interpretation of it.

So any meaning that we get from a change in our soul (whatever that means) can't possibly be taken to be accurate information about the real world. It can only be taken as a reflection of our own personality. It can't give any actual truth about the world.

Hmm. I've never thought that your opinions , your experiences, are something other than the real world. In fact interior feelings, opinions, desires, experiences so often drive human action that they might be the greatest factor affecting the "real world" fate of life on the planet (or possibly in the galaxy, for Trek fans).

As I see it, there is a quite meaningful portion of the actual real world that is not disclosed to objective scrutiny, yet is somehow almost more consequential for human affairs than most objective factors.

I can understand why science cannot truly touch on the actual subjective. So the subjective component of reality must be studied by means other than science.

 

[Willis Gravning]

I’ve posted this elsewhere, but a curiosity about consciousness is that one cannot offer any object evidence for it. For example, there is no way to tell if a computer is actually conscious, even if it tells us it is.

This kind of touches upon the ‘hard problem of consciousness’.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I think the above may never get us past the map/territory distinction. Sure, at some point we may be able to identify on the mental map: "that signifies San Francisco". But will it ever be the same as experiencing just one single moment of actual San Francisco?

It will never be the same as the experience that individual has. But that is the fundamental feature of subjective experience - it's unique to the experiencer; there's no way around it. Any reported experience is a crude translation.

You may both be standing on the same street corner in San Francisco at the same time, but still have radically different experiences of that situation - but there will still be some commonalities; we are generally able to communicate our experiences sufficiently well to feel we can have some understanding of someone else's experiential world in terms of our own experience.

For example, if you get vertigo on high, exposed places, and you describe your experience to someone else, they may agree that it's the same sensation they experience in that situation. You can never know whether they experience the same dizziness, nausea, and anxiety that you do, but our experiential comparisons are ultimately based on objective criteria (legs tremble, stomach churns, heart beats faster, low mood, etc.), so we assume they combine to produce similar experiences. We focus on the most salient features of experience - so if someone says they get the same physical sensations that you reported, but with an elevated mood, you'd probably interpret it as excitement rather than vertigo.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Hmm. I've never thought that your opinions , your experiences, are something other than the real world. In fact interior feelings, opinions, desires, experiences so often drive human action that they might be the greatest factor affecting the "real world" fate of life on the planet (or possibly in the galaxy, for Trek fans).

As I see it, there is a quite meaningful portion of the actual real world that is not disclosed to objective scrutiny, yet is somehow almost more consequential for human affairs than most objective factors.

Yes, what goes on in people's brains is real and consequential.

I can understand why science cannot truly touch on the actual subjective. So the subjective component of reality must be studied by means other than science.

That doesn't follow. There are many things that science can't directly access (e.g. the substance of reality itself) but can still study indirectly by observing their effects.

If you want to study the subjective directly, then by definition, only you can study your own experience, i.e. via introspection. But you can only report your results by translating your experience into objective terms that others can - potentially - understand. Also, there is a problem of validity; subjective experience is often misleading about both internal events and external ones. Introspection has limited usefulness if you can't tell the degree to which your subjective experience of some event is consistent with the objective reality of that event.

 

[durangodawood]

Yes, what goes on in people's brains is real and consequential.

That doesn't follow. There are many things that science can't directly access (e.g. the substance of reality itself) but can still study indirectly by observing their effects.

If you want to study the subjective directly, then by definition, only you can study your own experience, i.e. via introspection. But you can only report your results by translating your experience into objective terms that others can - potentially - understand. Also, there is a problem of validity; subjective experience is often misleading about both internal events and external ones. Introspection has limited usefulness if you can't tell the degree to which your subjective experience of some event is consistent with the objective reality of that event.

Science absolutely does touch the actual substance of material reality. If youre a wildlife biologist, for example, youre probably studying real elk (or earthworms or whatever). But yeah, for cosmic or atomic scale events, we engage mainly with effects rather than substance.

For experiences tho, it seems there's a component that has no substance at all: the feeling of an emotion, the meaning of something you learn. (Yes these have material correlates in brain activity, etc.)

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

Science absolutely does touch the actual substance of material reality. If youre a wildlife biologist, for example, youre probably studying real elk (or earthworms or whatever). But yeah, for cosmic or atomic scale events, we engage mainly with effects rather than substance.

At all levels, we only deal indirectly with material reality - observations & measurements are necessarily indirect, but I take your point. What I meant was that some things, such as the substance of reality, i.e. what the world is fundamentally 'made of', can't be resolved; however deep we go, ultimately it is what it is - outside of abstract mathematics, we can only describe it in terms of what we already know, which is itself built from our experience of the same 'stuff' at a higher level, i.e. we can only describe it in terms of how we experience it in bulk. It's like trying to describe a Lego block in terms of things built out of Lego blocks.

For experiences tho, it seems there's a component that has no substance at all: the feeling of an emotion, the meaning of something you learn. (Yes these have material correlates in brain activity, etc.)

That's the essence of subjectivity - feelings are what it is like to have certain physiological states influence the brain, and the associations they activate in it; meanings are what it is like to have a particular set of associations activated by something. So feelings can have different meanings depending on the associations they activate in particular circumstances.

Why there should be something that it is like when such things happen in the brain is the 'Hard Question'. I suspect it's what happens when a system functions by running a model of itself in an emulation of the world with the sophistication and complexity that many biological brains do.

We can only relate to the feelings and meanings of others in terms of what they can communicate to us about them and the corresponding feelings and meanings we have in response to their communication. A double layer of translations and assumptions and inferences. But both feelings and meanings are ultimately (indirectly) rooted in the objective physical world; feelings in physiological states, meanings in sensations of the world (sensations->perceptions->experiences).

 

[durangodawood]

At all levels, we only deal indirectly with material reality - observations & measurements are necessarily indirect, but I take your point. What I meant was that some things, such as the substance of reality, i.e. what the world is fundamentally 'made of', can't be resolved; however deep we go, ultimately it is what it is - outside of abstract mathematics, we can only describe it in terms of what we already know, which is itself built from our experience of the same 'stuff' at a higher level, i.e. we can only describe it in terms of how we experience it in bulk. It's like trying to describe a Lego block in terms of things built out of Lego blocks.....

You said a lot of interesting stuff in that post. But just one note for now....

An elk is just as much the substance of reality as is the finest grained fundamental particle. I'm a bit bothered by what I call "scale privilege" whereby we consider, or speak of, components as somehow more real that the whole.

I can just hear someone: "well that elk is really just these six fundamental particles playing out their interactions". I'd say that elk is also those particles. But that reductionist micro-scale reality is no more real that the human scale bones and organs of the creature, not to mention its social and ecosystem relationships.

 

[jayem]

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.

That's not really an explanation. What exactly is spirit? (And please, more info than a vague answer like "energy." Because energy is a physical entity that can be quantified in joules, or calories, or electron volts, depending on the application. Unless you think spirit is a physical entity.) Where does spirit come from? By what mechanism does it interact with the brain to produce consciousness? To me, invoking "spirit" only raises far more questions than it answers. Not to mention that it violates Occam's Razor by introducing an unexplained and apparently undectible entity.

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.

There are some theories. Here's a recent Scientific American article by neurobiologist Christoph Koch.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/

Consciousness isn't well understood now, but that doesn't mean it never will be. Think about our knowledge of genetics 300 years ago. Did any biologist have the faintest clue than inheritance is transmitted through a nucleic acid polymer which will be called DNA? And that a group of 3 nucleic acid bases tells the cell which amino acid is used to synthesize a protein? By the same token, none of us can possibly know what we may learn 300 years from now.

 

[durangodawood]

oops

 

[Chriliman]

If 3 is true, then all consciousness is finite which means non-consciousness is infinite. The ratio of finite to infinite is 0, which means our finite consciousness is equal to 0 or nothing. That's problematic.

That entire sentence is bizar. It's pure word salad. It doesn't mean anything. It reads like a bunch of smart-sounding english words strung together while pretending it is a sensible sentence.

It's only meaningful if indeed the ratio of finite to infinite is 0.

 

[Tinker Grey]

It's only meaningful if indeed the ratio of finite to infinite is 0.

Why? If something means something to me here and now, why should I care that that something won't mean anything to anybody 1000 years from now?

 

[Chriliman]

Why? If something means something to me here and now, why should I care that that something won't mean anything to anybody 1000 years from now?

It's fine if you don't care, but others may care.

 

[Tinker Grey]

It's fine if you don't care, but others may care.

Why should they?

 

[Chriliman]

Why should they?

Because it’s beneficial to learn from past people’s experience.

 

[Tinker Grey]

Because it’s beneficial to learn from past people’s experience.

Please elaborate. This doesn't seem to address why one should care what others find meaninful eons from now.