A question for the materialists on consciousness

[PhysBang]

So the circuitry and the electricity is the video game too? Or is the video game in fact the dynamic interaction of a conscious player with a succession of video images/sounds? I'm thinking the latter...The circuitry merely responds to the actions performed/not performed by the conscious player. It is not the game itself, anymore than the chessboard is the chess game.

But you do recognize that there is a physical thing in front of a player that is throwing off photons and making vibrations in the air, right? If so, then you realize that a collection of circuits and electricity is also something else. So it cannot be a horrible conceptual problem that there are different levels of descriptions for different events.

 

[PhysBang]

But the brain does alot of things that don't involve consciousness. It makes our body breathe and move and digest and stay warm and feel and so on. In fact, you can black out or be entirely asleep and still talk, walk, reach orgasm, attack someone (rage blackout) and, from what I've heard of Ambien takers, even drive. Others can even have their brain hypnotized to do all sorts of amazing things without consciousness. So consciousness can't just be what the brain is doing. Whatever it is, it is something entirely separate from brain activities, involved in some of them but certainly not all of them.

While I fear that in some cases you are confusing lack of memory with lack of consciousness, nothing that you have shown here is a problem for materialism. Materialists have never said that all brain activity is consciousness, just as no physiologist has claimed that lifting weights is the sole activity of arms.

 

[Yazata]

One of our problems is that nobody's defined the word 'consciousness'. It seems to me that the word can have a whole spectrum of meanings.

At one end, there are examples like worms reacting to being poked. If you are watching single-celled protozoa under a microscope and introduce a small amount of acid to one side of them, they all swim in the other direction as fast as their little cilia will move them. Many will react to light, swimming towards it or away from it. So we can perhaps define 'consciousness' in a minimal sense as reactivity to the environment. And that reduces to causality. If I kick a rock, it moves.

At the other end of its spectrum of meanings, 'consciousness' seems to refer to the whole inventory of human subjective interiority. That includes not only our awareness of our ideas, speculations, emotional feelings, aesthetic experiences and transcendental raptures, but also the consciousness that 'we' (the mysterious subject of experience) is aware of all of these myriad objects of experience.

Having characterized the ends of the 'consciousness' spectrum, the next problem is figuring out whether they are similar in kind, linked by a continuous chain of varieties of animal consciousness, or fundamentally different in kind, separated by an ontological chasm separating the causal meat-robot animals from the spiritual and transcendent humans.

There's a long history in Western philosophical theology of thinking of humans as transcendental souls fallen to the physical plane and trapped in material bodies. Descartes' dualism between physical and spiritual substance was basically a restatement of that tradition.

My own view is that human consciousness is continuous in kind with and basically an elaboration of the simplest kind of causal reactivity. When we look at the phylogenetic tree, and look at animals with increasingly elaborate nervous systems, we find them able to extract more and more information from their surroundings, and able to make more and more complex decisions based on that information.

It's difficult to to say very much about the inner subjective life of animals that are incapable of describing it in speech. (I often wondered what my dog's inner subjective life was like.) In the case of humans, it seems clear that we not only have the ability to react to the surrounding environment, we respond to our own inner process as well. We critique our own thought process and learn from our mistakes, we draw upon our memories, we plan for the future, we speculate. All of those activities seem to require some awareness of the particular organism whose inner processes these are.

That's where I speculate our sense of self arises. Apart from language and its ability to encode and represent abstractions, I'm not sure that there's anything there that isn't also found in the other mammals, the birds, and perhaps in beings as alien from ourselves as the octopi. They probably all have some idea of themselves, however rudimentary it might sometimes be. Even animals that have no sense of themselves, such as insects perhaps, can still be conscious of the smallest details of what happens around them.

 

[C C]

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

"Consciousness" may have narrowly meant cognition or understanding of sensory input and one's internal affairs in earlier times. But today it has become too broad an umbrella concept / category to be tossed around without clarification from the start. Set aside the hard problem aspect, and the end product of processes subsumed by "consciousness in general" is a human body externally behaving with apprehension of its environment. Including communicating some of its brain workings (referenced as thoughts) to others. Such outward, mechanical activities can be causally traced back to likewise public, complex, microscopic interactions / relationships in neural tissue. The ability of the latter to modify themselves falling out of that.

Where there is an explanatory gap is, again, to what the hard problem refers to: The showings of images, sounds, odors, etc -- the manifestations of experience. That and their so-called subjective properties. Unlike the dynamic material components and their mechanistic structures taken to exist in a space regardless of whether perceptual and intellective evidence for them is generated or not, the manifestations seem to lack any elemental precursors. They brutely or suddenly emerge just because certain systems or intricate arrays of connections develop, with certain kinds of electrochemical patterns being performed within them. Accordingly, there's the impression of magic -- of a complex spell or dance conjuring an extremely rare and utter novelty.

However, as another thread in this sub-forum indicates, physics is gradually overcoming its phobia or avoidance of the philosophical hard problem; and in alliance with neuroscientists, this capacity of "showing" may eventually be rendered global or fundamental in a primitive context. With only its organized and cognized sophisticated version arising with the aid of neural structure.

 

[Magical Realist]

So you think that because our brain activity does things that don't involve consciousness, that this must mean there is something additional where consciousness is involved rather than just brain activity?

Actually I'm countering the thesis that consciousness is what the brain is doing. If the brain does things that aren't conscious, then consciousness can't just be what the brain is doing. The brain doing something and consciousness are not iow the same thing. There is something else involved in consciousness.

 

[Sarkus]

Actually I'm countering the thesis that consciousness is what the brain is doing. If the brain does things that aren't conscious, then consciousness can't just be what the brain is doing. The brain doing something and consciousness are not iow the same thing. There is something else involved in consciousness.

Restating your position does not improve upon it, nor does it answer the issues raised with it: just because not everything the brain does is conscious does not mean that the brain does not / can not give rise to conscious activity without something else involved.

The simple possibility of consciousness being a subset of the activity of the brain puts a rather massive hole in your position that you have not addressed.

And if that subset of activity is that activity which requires a level of interconnectedness between the various parts of the brain... there is simply no need to invoke "something else" to be involved. I.e. it would the complex interconnectedness that differs between conscious and non-conscious activity.

 

[Magical Realist]

Restating your position does not improve upon it, nor does it answer the issues raised with it: just because not everything the brain does is conscious does not mean that the brain does not / can not give rise to conscious activity without something else involved.

So you are saying you agree with the thesis that consciousness is simply what the brain is doing or not?

The simple possibility of consciousness being a subset of the activity of the brain puts a rather massive hole in your position that you have not addressed.

Evidence exists of consciousness occurring in totally dead brains and reviving lucidly in brains riddled with Alzheimer's and dementia. That's indicative of the independence of consciousness from the state of the brain. How do you explain this evidence?

And if that subset of activity is that activity which requires a level of interconnectedness between the various parts of the brain... there is simply no need to invoke "something else" to be involved. I.e. it would the complex interconnectedness that differs between conscious and non-conscious activity.

That's your theory. Do you have some evidence for it?

 

[Magical Realist]

But you do recognize that there is a physical thing in front of a player that is throwing off photons and making vibrations in the air, right? If so, then you realize that a collection of circuits and electricity is also something else.

Yes..the whole machinery including the video game console, a dvd, and a TV set. But this isn't something separate from the circuitry itself. It is simply the whole of all that circuitry. Like how the house includes the parts of the house. With consciousness materialists are asserting no categorical inclusiveness like this. They are asserting that firing neurons ARE subjective events involving qualities not found in the neurons themselves. I question the basis of that sort of identification.

 

[PhysBang]

Actually I'm countering the thesis that consciousness is what the brain is doing. If the brain does things that aren't conscious, then consciousness can't just be what the brain is doing. The brain doing something and consciousness are not iow the same thing. There is something else involved in consciousness.

You are simply attacking a straw man. That cosnciousness is a brain activity doesn't require that it be the only activity of the brain.

 

[PhysBang]

Yes..the whole machinery including the video game console, a dvd, and a TV set. But this isn't something separate from the circuitry itself. It is simply the whole of all that circuitry.

Not at all. A computer system can in part be generating a video game while also doing other activities. That we can describe part of its activities in different ways does not preculde us from understanding that the video game does not arise, as if by magic, separately from the physical system of the computer system.

Like how the house includes the parts of the house. With consciousness materialists are asserting no categorical inclusiveness like this. They are asserting that firing neurons ARE subjective events involving qualities not found in the neurons themselves. I question the basis of that sort of identification.

Materialists suggest that consciousness is part of the activity of firing neurons. You can question this basis, but not on the specious grounds you have so far raised.

 

[Yazata]

Actually I'm countering the thesis that consciousness is what the brain is doing.

I inclined to think that's what consciousness is.

If the brain does things that aren't conscious, then consciousness can't just be what the brain is doing. The brain doing something and consciousness are not iow the same thing. There is something else involved in consciousness.

I don't think that I'd say that everything the brain is doing is consciousness, just because it's the brain doing it. There's lots of cell metabolism stuff in there for instance.

I guess that I'd define 'consciousness', at it's most fundamental level, as responsiveness to the environment. If A is conscious of X, then A is detecting X and in the more neurologically sophisticated organisms, acquiring information about it.

That needn't mean that the conscious organism A must be conscious that it is conscious of X. Our awareness that we are aware of something constitutes a whole lot of additional information and new subject matter that simpler organisms probably are unequipped to process. A spider's consciousness of a fly in its web probably isn't accompanied by any 'Oh wow, I'm sitting here looking at a fly in my web!' self-awareness. It just detects the fly and its predation programs kick in.

In human beings, an analogous situation might be 'blind-sight'. There are brain-injured people who insist that they are blind and can't see a thing. But ask them to walk across a room where obstacles have been placed, and they will walk around the obstacles while insisting that they couldn't see them. Ask them how they did it, and they will say they were guessing or something.

Apparently what's happening is that the ability to visually detect external objects, and hence consciousness of them, at least in the basic sense, is still intact, while the ability to process the additional information about the process itself, the awareness that 'I'm seeing X', has been lost.

 

[Magical Realist]

Not at all. A computer system can in part be generating a video game while also doing other activities. That we can describe part of its activities in different ways does not preculde us from understanding that the video game does not arise, as if by magic, separately from the physical system of the computer system.

A video game console, a DVD, and a TV set isn't the same as a computer. But a computer IS the sum of its circuitry too. So its the same deal. A whole that includes its various parts. Not even remotely analogous to consciousness, which at no point can be logically derived from the mere firing of synapses.

Materialists suggest that consciousness is part of the activity of firing neurons. You can question this basis, but not on the specious grounds you have so far raised.

What activity of the firing neurons is the color magenta? Or the sound of Beethoven's Fifth? Or the mathematical equation E=mc2? What is the logical connection between the neurons' behavior and these subjective experiences?

 

[Magical Realist]

You are simply attacking a straw man. That cosnciousness is a brain activity doesn't require that it be the only activity of the brain.

I'm not the one who equated consciousness with what a brain is doing. I'm simply denying that they are the same thing. Perhaps you should follow the argument more carefully.

 

[Magical Realist]

I inclined to think that's what consciousness is.



I don't think that I'd say that everything the brain is doing is consciousness, just because it's the brain doing it. There's lots of cell metabolism stuff in there for instance.

I guess that I'd define 'consciousness', at it's most fundamental level, as responsiveness to the environment. If A is conscious of X, then A is detecting X and in the more neurologically sophisticated organisms, acquiring information about it.

That needn't mean that the conscious organism A must be conscious that it is conscious of X. Our awareness that we are aware of something constitutes a whole lot of additional information and new subject matter that simpler organisms probably are unequipped to process. A spider's consciousness of a fly in its web probably isn't accompanied by any 'Oh wow, I'm sitting here looking at a fly in my web!' self-awareness. It just detects the fly and its predation programs kick in.

In human beings, an analogous situation might be 'blind-sight'. There are brain-injured people, sometimes stroke-victims, who insist that they are blind and can't see a thing. But ask them to walk across a room where obstacles have been placed, and they will walk around the obstacles while insisting that they couldn't see them. Ask them how they did it, and they will say they were guessing or something.

Apparently what's happening is that the ability to visually detect external objects, and hence consciousness of them, at least in the minimal sense, is still intact, while the ability to process the additional information about the process itself, the subjective awareness that 'I'm seeing X', has been lost.

So consciousness would seem to include much more than just what a brain is doing. It would include a living body responding to an environment in some logical way. I think experiments with sensory deprivation back this up. A brain deprived of sensory stimulation soon lapses into a trancelike state which doesn't seem to be conscious of anything except hallucinated images/colors/sounds.

I'm intrigued with the suggestion than consciousness is a degree of interconnectivity. So I'm not exactly deadset on it being a substance. This would suggest that consciousness is a set of relationships in between units-a spatiotemporal matrix extending from the interior of the brain and branching out thru our bodies to the energies of the physical enviroment.

 

[PhysBang]

A video game console, a DVD, and a TV set isn't the same as a computer. But a computer IS the sum of its circuitry too. So its the same deal. A whole that includes its various parts. Not even remotely analogous to consciousness, which at no point can be logically derived from the mere firing of synapses.

Again you seem to attack a straw man. I was very careful in speaking of a computer system, something that can include many parts and do many things, all of which can be described merely as the operation of circuitry while at the same time having wildly different descriptions that are also correct. So there is no conceptual problem in allowing that something can be described in more than one way.

A materialist says that, among the many things that brains and neurons do, one such thing is consciousness. That consciousness is a different type of description from standard biological description does not mean that is cannot be describing the same thing as neuron operation.

What activity of the firing neurons is the color magenta? Or the sound of Beethoven's Fifth? Or the mathematical equation E=mc2?

These are technical questions, not conceptual questions.

What is the logical connection between the neurons' behavior and these subjective experiences?

There is clearly a practical link: people learn about things, this effects their brain. The logical link then is in the history of the causal interactions between the operation of their brains and the various means of learning about these things available.

We could ask the same questions about the relationship between these things and the contents of computer memory. The answers are available and seem to pose no great conceptual problem even though computers are different from magenta, music, and physics.

I'm not the one who equated consciousness with what a brain is doing. I'm simply denying that they are the same thing. Perhaps you should follow the argument more carefully.

I'm following what you say very carefully. You were saying that because the brain does things other than consciousness, then consciousness cannot be due to the brain. That is a bad argument. I'm sorry that I noticed that was your argument and drew attention to it.

 

[Aqueous Id]

Meditation is not hypnosis or a dream like state.

Your ideas about meditation don't circumscribe the personal experience I related here. So there us no point in trying to do that.

If you are going to practice meditation its best to use one of the time proven techniques.

This was an experiment, not a ritual. What worked best for me was the method I designed for myself, stripped of ritual and nonsense.

If you use one of the known and widely practiced techniques and get stuck or have some kind of crisis, you have literally thousands of years of experience to draw upon for help.

I achieved my goal, which was to discover for myself what the monks are claiming is happening to them, as well as to test the value of interrogating the mind while in a trance. This has nothing to do with crisis management or any of the nonsense accrued over thousands of years of ritual practice.

If you make up something as you go along (i.e. "trying to imagine how electrons ... I went through a series of dream-like explanations") and you get stuck or experience some kind of crisis, its a lot less likely that someone will be able to help, because no one will know where you are or how you got there.

You did not understand me. In my awake state, as I was planning this experiment, I formulated a set of questions inquiring into the nature of consciousness. During trance, I was at all times self aware and aware of my singular goal of seeking the answers to my questions. This can be described as having a dream, yet remaining conscious, aware and able to impose a structure over the dream so that it doesn't wander. Other than that, the trances I had are best characterized as "profound religious experiences" in that they were so riveting I needed a full day afterwards to convince myself that that my sense of a paranormal experience was nothing more than an artifact of delusion. These trances were highly organized in the flow of ideas, sequential and coherent like chapters in a story, incredibly rich in factual detail, and mostly correct or plausible in the explanations offered, even though, as I mentioned, my imagination was interpolating in the manner of superstitious ideation. By all accounts I induced the same or similar mental state in the legend of Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree, or Mohammed in the cave, or the writer of Book of Revelation. I believe this is probably the same experience reported by Buddhist monks as the the state of "mindfulness/oneness/enlightenment". Additionally, however, I induced vivid visualizations and the answers conveyed by these visualizations.

After studying Buddhism and becoming intrigued by the various reports of the effects of self-hypnosis, It took me about two years of on-again off-again curiosity to discover that I could achieve a deep meditative state -- disregarding the Buddhist classification of such states -- and very quickly, within a matter of weeks of planning this, I was able to enter my first trance. I logged everything as soon as it was over, and repeated the experiment weekly for about 6 weeks, each time starting with fresh questions, which I memorized in advance. I set an appointed time and place to do this, right after a special meal prepared in advance, and with all of my chores and personal affairs attended to in advance, with no distractions or worries to interfere. I also made sure I was well rested before starting, so I would not fall asleep. The sessions lasted from about 1 to 4 hours each.

So when I referred to trying to imagine how electrons (as I suppose this happens) associate with the virtual world of the mind which you describe as "making it up as you go" I am referring to the core question of this thread, followed by answers that came to me which I recognize are inventions of the imagination which feed delusions or dreams. That is, there is no flow of information coming from some imaginary source. It's simply a direct access of personal memories, although I have to say the visual renderings were quite exotic, as if I have an untapped store of art locked inside my head. And that embellishment is part of what I meant by inciting my own superstitious ideation.

I gave this originally only to controvert the claims of authors like the one you cited, although I realize now I can also apply it to deduce the various regions of the brain which can be altered at will through techniques such as this. I'll table that for now. My hesitation with your source is that he seems to be looking at this narrowly , which seems to also be your POV. It's certainly true that meditants can alter their brain patterns in controlled experiments. But the rest is something akin to religiosity which has no bearing on the physical questions at hand.

And we need to bring in the PET scans of people in prayer in meditation, as well as a chart of the brain's functional areas, and diagrams of the neuron, neural circuits and esp the synaptic junction. This in particular should be addressed:

​

These structures grow in place for a lot of reasons, but one of them, the one at issue, is because experience causes them to grow that way. I think this is the primary answer to the OP, and then the corollary to this is the PET scan evidence of people during prayer, meditation/trance or any other controlled state of mind. Obviously the junctions are still present, there is just a large reduction in neurotransmitter as various regions of the brain are quieted. But those patterns are another thing. That's what is producing all of the experience -- just as the patterns in the motor regions are vital yet unrelated to experience . . . other than when supported by feedback from remote afferent sense organs.

EDIT

I need to add this, which I think is probably the type of study that provoked the OP.

Prayer May Reshape Your Brain ... And Your Reality

which includes this

Is This Your Brain On God?

 

[Magical Realist]

Again you seem to attack a straw man. I was very careful in speaking of a computer system, something that can include many parts and do many things, all of which can be described merely as the operation of circuitry while at the same time having wildly different descriptions that are also correct. So there is no conceptual problem in allowing that something can be described in more than one way.

We were talking about a video game. Then you switched to computer, effectively changing the goal posts. In any case, a computer is not anything more than the sum of its circuitry operation. A computer engineer can show you a schematic of how all its operations break down into components and their operation. The same cannot be done with consciousness. No amount of examing neural circuitry is going to break down consciousness into physical processes because consciousness is not physical. It is mental and thus derives it's nature from wholly mental operations. Calling consciousness a firing of neurons is like trying to reduce a movie to the behavior of electrons in your TV set.

A materialist says that, among the many things that brains and neurons do, one such thing is consciousness. That consciousness is a different type of description from standard biological description does not mean that is cannot be describing the same thing as neuron operation.

Then go ahead. Describe neural firings in such a way as they would describe my consciousness of typing this sentence. You claim the two are the same. Then prove it.

There is clearly a practical link: people learn about things, this effects their brain. The logical link then is in the history of the causal interactions between the operation of their brains and the various means of learning about these things available.

This does nothing to explain how neural firings equate to experienced qualia. There is no logical or practical link here that would explain how one gives rise to the other.

We could ask the same questions about the relationship between these things and the contents of computer memory. The answers are available and seem to pose no great conceptual problem even though computers are different from magenta, music, and physics.

Computers aren't really remembering anything. They are just storing bits that get reaccessed as information that gets translated into a visual presentation. Then again when we look at the magenta and the music and equations that get so presented, such a presentation is only being experienced by a conscious brain. So your computer analogy assumes what it is meant to explain--the mystery of how we experience qualia in the first place, whether that qualia be seen on a screen or in the real world.

I'm following what you say very carefully. You were saying that because the brain does things other than consciousness, then consciousness cannot be due to the brain. That is a bad argument. I'm sorry that I noticed that was your argument and drew attention to it.

No..I'm simply denying the equivalence of consciousness with what the brain does. They aren't the same thing. If I say the brain is doing something, I am not necessarily saying it is conscious. We're talking about two different things here. We are conscious due to something more than just the fact that our brain is doing something.

 

[Yazata]

Meditation is not hypnosis or a dream like state.

I emphatically agree. Buddhist meditation (the sort of meditation that I'm most familiar with) isn't concerned with trance states. There are two basic kinds of Buddhist meditation, Samatha and Vipassana. The first (which is found in many traditions and isn't unique to Buddhism) is practice in controlling one's attention, so that it doesn't jump around madly from object to object. The second (which is unique to Buddhism) is basically a process of dispassionate inner observation of how psychological states arise and subside.

If you are going to practice meditation its best to use one of the time proven techniques.
If you use one of the known and widely practiced techniques and get stuck or have some kind of crisis, you have literally thousands of years of experience to draw upon for help.

I agree. That's why it's best to practice meditation under the guidance of a competent teacher.

One common difficulty that new meditators sometimes experience is that subjectively blissful states can arise fairly early in their practice. Buddhism has a whole classification of meditative states and bliss states are among the more elementary attainments. (Subsequent practice addresses overcoming the attractions of these states.) Absent counsel from a teacher who is familiar with such things, it's very easy for a novice meditator to mistakenly convince him/her self that an intense emotional state was the enlightenment experience.

 

[PhysBang]

We were talking about a video game. Then you switched to computer, effectively changing the goal posts.

I see you haven't seen a video game since 1970. Let me assure you, for the last three decades, video games have been run on computer systems.

So no, I did not change the subject, I merely assumed that you had a baseline understanding that you did not have.

In any case, a computer is not anything more than the sum of its circuitry operation. A computer engineer can show you a schematic of how all its operations break down into components and their operation. The same cannot be done with consciousness. No amount of examing neural circuitry is going to break down consciousness into physical processes because consciousness is not physical.

So there you are just begging the question.

As far as I can tell, you have no arguments here, just your own personal preference shouted over and over again.

Then go ahead. Describe neural firings in such a way as they would describe my consciousness of typing this sentence. You claim the two are the same. Then prove it.

Again you miss the point. I was merely showing that a difference in type of description does not mean a lack of identity, as you seemed to claim.

This does nothing to explain how neural firings equate to experienced qualia. There is no logical or practical link here that would explain how one gives rise to the other.

Really? So you have never done anything practical with language?

I'm not sure I have a hard time believing that.

Computers aren't really remembering anything. They are just storing bits that get reaccessed as information that gets translated into a visual presentation.

And yet there are clear links between their operation and things in the world.

Then again when we look at the magenta and the music and equations that get so presented, such a presentation is only being experienced by a conscious brain. So your computer analogy assumes what it is meant to explain--the mystery of how we experience qualia in the first place, whether that qualia be seen on a screen or in the real world.

No, again you miss the point. I wasn't making an analogy, I was pointing out a situation in which there is a clear practical and logical link between physics states and semantic content.

No..I'm simply denying the equivalence of consciousness with what the brain does.

Now you are telling the truth. Earlier you were pretending to offer an argument in favor of your position. I an glad that you have decided to go the honest route and merely espouse your dogma.

 

[fogpipe]

Your ideas about meditation don't circumscribe the personal experience I related here. So there us no point in trying to do that.

I have 20 years plus in a couple of buddhist (non-theist) meditation techniques and its true that i cant identify with the experiences you have related here. You seem to have conflated meditation with hypnosis, god, some sort of idiosyncratic visualization technique and who knows what else. There are probably an infinite number of mind states available to humans but not all of them are useful or healthy.
If you are really interested in pursuing meditation, two years of regular, sincere practice is what many might consider merely a good start. There are a lot of places you can get more info if you would like to. Entering "meditation" in the search box at sciencedaily.com can give you an idea of the benefits and with the state of things today, if you live in a first world country, its likely that you can get some kind of meditation instruction somewhere near you. Good luck