A question for the materialists on consciousness

A question directed at the "consciousness as an emergent phenomena" and "consciousness as an illusion" believers.

How do you explain this?

From: http://themindunleashed.org/2014/04/neuroscientist-explains-meditation-changes-brain.html

 

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I don't see a dilemma, perhaps you can explain where you think it lies.

 

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Apparently what you think (or not) can actually change your brain

Pretty amazing for a merely emergent property or an illusion. An illusion or emergent phenomenon that can change physical reality? How does one account for that? Whats going on here?

 

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It would be the other way around. The physical reality is the brain. From a materialist perspective, mediation is a specific action being performed by your brain.
Your conscious experience of it is that which is manifest or illusory.
So there is no more dilemma that a repeated mental action causes changes to the brain than there is that physical exercise can build muscle.

 

I don't think that is exactly news. People have been documenting changes in the brain from everything from learning to play a musical instrument to visualizing shooting a basketball, for as long as anyone has been able to measure such things.

It's exactly what you would expect from an emergent pattern's ("property's") effect on its substrate, and the entire concept of "illusion" is probably meaningless in this context.

 

Ok. Well i find it amazing that the disposition of the mind can actually affect physical reality and alter the structure of the brain. It makes me wonder if consciousness isnt an actual fundamental property and "materiality" the emergent phenomenon.

More evidence that the mind can alter reality at the molecular level:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131208090343.htm

More here on meditation aging and telomeres http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aditi-nerurkar-md-mph/meditation-genes_b_3276602.html

 

The Huffington Post is not a reputable site for science information. They regularly publish false information, sometimes even dangerous information.

 

This is no stranger than thinking you want a drink and picking up a cup. The brain actually generates thoughts, and those thoughts effect the body, the brain, and the outside world. It the subjective experience of a self thinking that is also a thought.

 

If various 'conscious' states are data-processing tasks performed by the brain, as the 'materialists' believe they are, and if performance of different tasks are localized in different parts of the brain, as seems to be the case to some extent, we would expect to see different patterns of brain activity associated with different kinds of conscious states.

Given neuro-plasticity, if we task a brain with doing a particular thing many times, whether that's riding a bike, solving Soduku puzzles or doing mindfulness meditation, we would expect to see the areas of the brain associated with those tasks expanding. Like Raithere said, it isn't dissimilar from going to the gym, lifting weights, and having your muscles grow.

 

What is illusory about meditating? Aren't people really meditating? It seems a real experience to those who experience it. And what is "manifest" about that experience if it is "illusory"?

 

I see a deeper issue than just repetitive mental activity causing changes in the brain. I see it along the lines of the mind/body problem. How is it, if consciousness and the self are mere illusions springing from the synaptic firings of the brain, is it possible for them to exert causal influences on that activity itself? How, in other words, is the brain tasked, and who is there to do the tasking? Well we are ofcourse, and we do it thru our actual decisions and intentions. So the materialist is faced with the problem of how an allegedly brain-generated activity called the mind which at every point is consequential to its processes in turn exerts causal influence on the brain itself, controlling its activities and eventually altering the structure of the brain itself.

 

Matter gives rise to consciousness. Without matter consciousness would get bored, and it would off its self. I highly doubt omni-consciousness would be subjected to boredom for it to know it needs something to do and friends to do it with.

Consciousness needs to be born or its insane and complex, matter is its father.

 

Patterns affect substrates.

Obviously the notion of materiality is an idea, a pattern of neural firings that partly constitutes the mind and is available to that organized subset of mental patterns at "mind" level we label "consciousness". But you can't have a consciousness or a mind level generally without such constituent patterns, of some kind or another - the existence of the "mind" level, and its enormous development and complexity, is one of nature's amazements - but you sound as though you have other fish to fry, here.

 

Not all materialists call consciousness an illusion. But even if it is, one can say that certain brain activities (not necessarily all) that are associated with consciousness can also change brain structures. So there does not seem to be any problem here.

It seems more problematic to ask how a purely non-physical activity can have any physical effect whatsoever.

 

Yes..that is actually a better statement of the mind/body problem. How consciousness, as an entirely mental phenomenon, has any physical effects at all. How iow are physical and mental able to interact, and what is the interface of such interaction?

 

The idea that there is one who meditates. This is pretty central to Zen Buddhism. Certainly the brain is doing something which effects the body and mind, but only the body is fully real.

 

You seem to be assuming that consciousness is purely mental. The evidence seems to be the contrary, e.g., physical things change consciousness, consciousness changes physical things.

 

Yet when I am conscious of say a chair, the real physical chair is not inside my brain. Only a thought of the chair is there, which in itself lacks physical substance. When it comes down to it, even the brain is just an abstract thought or generalization. It is an entity predefined by language and given conceptual meaning by science. When I think about a brain, where is that brain? Nowhere. It is a thought in my mind, that's all. That's what I mean by mental.

 

Well, you say that the thought lacks physical substance.

You seem to be confusing concepts and actual thoughts. While surely concepts are abstractions, the specific thoughts of an actual person need not be abstractions.

 

If the thought of a chair isn't a conceptualized abstraction, what is it then?