Consciousness is a magical property

I love being me.

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I don't think saying "Consciousness is a magical process" is either ignorant or stupid.

 

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I'm thinking a better title for you is Troll.

 

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Yes

 

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:facepalm:

 

Yeh that's right. Shut up and worship me. I am a genius.

 

The title of this thread illustrates my new stance on the subject.

 

You first.

 

Consciousness is, magical, in the sense that nobody knows how that particular magic trick works.

If a skilled magician was levitating his lovely assistant, this would be considered magic, as long as one cannot figure out how he does it. It appears to defy what we know of science and nature. Once you know how the trick works, the magic is lost.

Magic tricks make use of science and technology, put together in simple combinations, to create special effects that can trick the sensory systems, so the magic trick appears to defy known laws of science.

As far as I know, nobody in the science audience has yet figured out the secret to this natural magic trick. Mother nature is still having a laugh.

 

How do you even function? No really...how are you alive right now?

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Wellwisher seems to understand the definition of magic, now if only we can teach you Cortex if only we could teach you.

THE BRAIN AS A MACHINE

SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe. Consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html#ixzz1rmQLS82H

Or visit the site below
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

 

Okay, but that doesn't really shed any light on it. You're simply making it an issue of semantics. You've just labeled it.

 

I think that without a clear objective definition of the word "magical", the position is pretty silly.

 

The brain is a very complex device that I believe originally evolved on some far away planet, those beings then invented a way to transfer data from their biological brains and put them into highly advanced super computers which evolved them to "God Status" then they seeded human life here on Earth. Yeah I know "Ancient Aliens Theory" all over again, sorry if I sound REALLY Sci-Fi here...

 

You should avoid using the word ''magical'', as it's usage automatically renders the idea of consciousness, being a trancendent property, into the non-serious pile.

If consciousness is a gross-material, physical structure, then we need to know what it is before we start saying what it is and what it isn't.

Consciousness in this case means, being aware of oneself, and everything in relation to that self.

jan.

 

The problem with invoking an ancient and highly evolved extraterrestrial civilization to account for the existence of anything here on Earth has always been that it merely causes the very same questions to apply to them instead of us.

Surely you realize this?

 

Consciousness is a magical process

I have gone back to the stance that consciousness is a magical process after reading this by wellwisher:

 

Conscious ness is a mystical process

I took Yazata's advice and dropped the use of the word "magical". Now I'm using one that more readily conveys the mystique surrounding consciousness.

 

Are we to regard everything we have no scientific understanding of, as ''magical''?

jan.

 

I am requesting moderator to edit the title of this thread to "Consciousness is a mystical process".