A question for the materialists on consciousness

[fogpipe]

Go ahead then and tell us how consciousness arises from the brain. I'll wait..

Actually its like I'm sitting in 2014 waiting for materialists to give this great explanation of consciousness that they tout so much but never seem to offer.

I know how you feel
Ever since my collage days when i first got enamored of materialism (about 40 years ago) i have been waiting. I guess it will probably come along with my flying car Its odd that the physical sciences seem to have moved on and are comfortable with uncertainty but the biological sciences seem to continue to look for some kind of one to one relationship between brain and mind.

 

[fogpipe]

I do think that this thread is talking around the question of neuroscience, without really wanting to investigate it as I think it should be investigated. That being said, I can appreciate your long experience doing meditation, as well as Yazata's, and all the other fine folks here. I would have been doing it for some 30 or 40 years now had I not been dissuaded by the ritual elements, and what the atheist/skeptic in me regards as a fascination with sort of magical powers and properties. I also envy the meditants who gain from their Buddhist experience without feeling encroached upon by that sort of thing.

Attachment to fixed views and ritual are discouraged in buddhism and are considered fetters. Some seem to need it tho and i agree communicating with them can sometimes be a chore, but in the end one is encouraged to view even buddhism itself as a means to an end, as a raft is relinquished when one reaches the other shore. The meditation techniques are aimed specifically at freeing oneself from fixed views of self, other and the world. Maybe you should give it another look. I would recommend trying it with the support of a teacher and group, when one begins to see through the fixed ideas of self, it can be a fairly harrowing experience.

 

[Aqueous Id]

@Aqueous Id - I tried to read your last post thorough over and over, but it's just too much work. Fogpipe makes a few valid points above. Mostly I just have to ask, so you suppose you're right and all the best men, and women too, in countless different cultures, of various religious faiths over the past two or three thousand years -including Siddhartha Gautama- they all got it wrong and were laboring under misconceptions, but you, superior man that you are- have finally got it all right?

Huh? I only said that I wasn't interested in the rituals of Buddhism. I was keenly interested in the deliberate shutting down of brain centers as reported by monks (and now verified by PET scans), and I had learned self hypnosis through a graduate school experiment I participated in. After a couple of years of familiarizing myself with Buddhism, and practicing meditation, I decided to cut to the chase, and to merge both meditation and self hypnosis to (a) see if I could achieve the deliberate quieting of the brain reported by monks and (b) to see if I could induce a hypnotic state and (c) to see if I could exploit that condition to explain to myself what sentience is and (d) to do this in the manner of the Zen questioning.

I think the argument that Buddhism is perfected by time is silly. I can't see any substantial progress since the time of ancient writers other than embellishment on rituals. I suspect a historian could explain how the myth, legend and fable grew over that time -- it certainly innovated since its admitted roots in Hinduism. But Siddhartha is not a historical person. The story is at best a fable. But this argument reminds me of the one by the Christian apologists who like to think that the persistence of a ritual over time establishes it as "debugged". And that's just plain nutty.

There is nothing superior about me equating my experience with that of such a fabled person, or with Mohammad, or with the writer of Revelation. They all appear to be suffering from something like epilepsy (see the reference to that in the link from NPR). Indeed, shutting down normally functioning brain centers is a little like suffering from an illness. And, conversely, as the article explains, suffering from brain anomalies may induce the "religious experience". As I said, I had to recover on the second day of each of these experiments, because I was prone to believe something metaphysical was behind the curtain.

- this meditation thing, and it's not all that it's cracked up to be ("nothing more than an artifact of delusion") and, oh yeah, there is no God!? And you expect us too take you seriously!? Just who is it you fancy you are?

"Those are my opinions, if you don't like them, I have more." (Groucho Marx).

And yes, there is no God. Every conception of God is a human invention, therefore every God so described is imaginary. Therefore God cannot possibly exist any more than the Tooth Fairy can exist. Arbitrarily deciding that the converse is true does not make it true. You simply end up in the same quagmire, looping on the imagination again.

And yes, the states of the meditant can be described as delusional. For example, the sense of Oneness with external reality is understood to be the response to quieting the self-awareness centers of the brain. I think delusion within a delusion is closer. I'm trying to be candid without raising hackles. It's just that I can't think of any way to gloss over this without losing the meaning.

Again, see the links to NPR. Maybe you should start at the following link, although I would encourage you to peruse all of the associated links.

Are Spiritual Encounters All In Your Head?

Attachment to fixed views and ritual are discouraged in buddhism and are considered fetters. Some seem to need it tho and i agree communicating with them can sometimes be a chore, but in the end one is encouraged to view even buddhism itself as a means to an end,

I think you are assigning a different meaning to "ritual" than I'm using here. I wasn't referring to the rituals your religion may encourage you to shy from, but the ones they ask you to embrace, which you then spend years working on.

as a raft is relinquished when one reaches the other shore.

One of the rituals I would cite is the excessive use of metaphor. I realize they had no science to explain phenomena for which they invented the religions, but some of that science is available today. Religions should really try to update, to move to the beat of new information. That being said, it's a fine metaphor.

The meditation techniques are aimed specifically at freeing oneself from fixed views of self, other and the world.

Yes I am aware of that. My purpose was never the same but my intent was to understand what they were doing to their brains, and what we are doing to our brains when we are not doing what they (you) are doing to their/your brain(s). That freeing of the self is the ultimate brain center being quieted. That was not my goal, although I experienced the sense of Oneness nonetheless. As I recall that was on my 5th (out of 6) trance, and I went back one more time to inquire into it and came out with very elaborate technical explanation which needs a thread on dreaming to put it in perspective. But after each experience I was temporarily convinced of things not possible, and things that are only remotely possible in the sense that were planted in my imagination by both science and science fiction sources (memories, partially directed and partially random).

Maybe you should give it another look. I would recommend trying it with the support of a teacher and group, when one begins to see through the fixed ideas of self, it can be a fairly harrowing experience.

I did have a teacher when I lived briefly in a Hindu community and it probably killed my interest in seeking a Buddhist teacher. My reasons for rejecting Buddhism are primarily the rituals you and Yazata have referred to thus far. The expectations you have expressed -- about the time it takes to achieve some level of brain quieting -- can be undone by visiting labs and clinics where hypnosis is routinely performed, or by following up with some of the research such as the links I have been posting here. For example, you only need to see the PET scan of a car wreck victim who is admitted to ER for reporting similar delusions to concerned family members. I have no other word to describe what is added in Buddhism, other than "ritual", to define the difference between one brain quieting method and the other. But I'm open to suggestions.

That being said, I would in a heartbeat campaign on behalf of Dalai Lama if he were to run for US President, beginning with support of a movement to strike the citizenship requirement. And that goes for, I suppose, millions of like minded monks and lay people.

 

[Aqueous Id]

...oops again

 

[fogpipe]

My reasons for rejecting Buddhism are primarily the rituals you and Yazata have referred to thus far. The expectations you have expressed -- about the time it takes to achieve some level of brain quieting -- can be undone by visiting labs and clinics where hypnosis is routinely performed, or by following up with some of the research such as the links I have been posting here.

I think you may be confusing ritual with technique. Buddhist meditation is a technology for exploring the subjective (but the physical health benefits are considerable) and like any other skill it takes some time to become proficient with it. Your faith in clinics, labs and hypnosis may give you comfort but i doubt that they can give the kind of results you would see with a regular meditation practice. However, many people dont really want to know how their minds work and one does find out things about oneself that one might rather not know.

 

[PhysBang]

Go ahead then and tell us how consciousness arises from the brain. I'll wait..

See, there you did it again: you take the lack of finishing a difficult task as proof that the task is impossible. That is a logical fallacy.

Actually its like I'm sitting in 2014 waiting for materialists to give this great explanation of consciousness that they tout so much but never seem to offer.

No materialist has offered an explanation. They merely claim that so-called mental phenomena are physical processes. There is ample evidence for this position.

Breaking down exactly how a brain (and other organs involved) works is an extremely difficult task. This task needs to be done before any theory of mind could be proven, whatever "proven" means.

I don't know that consciousness violates the laws of physics.

I am not surprised that you do not understand your own view.

As a non-materialist, you are claiming that no physical description of the operation of an organism can produce consciousness. You even go so far as to claim that no physical process can produce certain behaviors. So your theory requires brains, or at least human bodies, that do not follow physical laws.

The gap between physical and mental exists whether you wanna admit it or not.

The problem here is that you take a difference in description and declare it, with no reason or with poor reasons, to be a metaphysical difference. And then you stick your fingers in your ears.

 

[fogpipe]

Again, see the links to NPR. Maybe you should start at the following link, although I would encourage you to peruse all of the associated links.

Are Spiritual Encounters All In Your Head?

Most of that article seems to be about people experiencing some sort of phenomena when their brains are interfered with in some fashion. I have no doubt that that is possible, but i dont see how it has much at all to do with meditation as a tool for greater self knowledge, better physical health and longevity.

 

[Aqueous Id]

I think you may be confusing ritual with technique.

The Google definition includes "of, relating to, or done as a religious or solemn rite." Does that cover technique? In any case I may need to find a more precise term, or else we need to coin one. I am referring to all things done peripheral to the direct act of quieting targeted regions of the brain (even through you need not know that there are any such regions). I'm calling all of the rest of that activity "ritual". If you can think of a better word, then suggest one. What I was referring to is the way a teaching, concerning a religious practice, becomes ritualized by the adherents, because they believe it is the necessary procedure to achieve their religious goals.

My goals are/were different, so there was no need for me to entertain these "rituals". Once I realized that, by meditating, I had successfully quieted some part of my brain (though less certain of what that meant back then) it wasn't long before I noticed this was part of the process that enabled a graduate student to put me in a trance. years before that. Hence the decision to investigate the nature of brain-quieting exercises, without regard to the framework of Buddhist meditation. was for me greatly simplified.

Buddhist meditation is a technology for exploring the subjective (but the physical health benefits are considerable) and like any other skill it takes some time to become proficient with it.

Yes and in fact you could write a book on the subject. Now suppose I tell you I wanted to strip all of that away. I merely wanted to quiet targeted areas of the brain. Now you see, I was not concerned with mastering Buddhism like a monk. I merely wanted to implement the brain quieting such monks report.

Your faith in clinics, labs and hypnosis may give you comfort but i doubt that they can give the kind of results you would see with a regular meditation practice.

I wasn't looking for the results in Buddhist meditation since I was unable to adopt what seems to me a copious amount of superstition, myth and fable, to explain phenomena for which the creators of Buddhism had no science. Some of this science is available today, particularly PET scans, and all of the related neuroscience. We can now understand that the physical manifestations of meditation involve the quieting of regions of the brain known to host specific mental activities. That's a huge update to the ancient tenets of Buddhism, which are in fact the elements that rely on faith, while I am advocating for best evidence, which is simply a matter of knowledge. And of course that means it's subject to amendment and repeal. The knowledge base concerning PET scans, as explained by Ms Haggerty of NPR and her sources, in relation to Buddhist meditation, seems to corroborate what I experienced. And I think we will find other corroboration like this:

Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study

In particular, the successful quieting of the brain's center of self-awareness was the "material" source of those monks' sense of being One with ultimate reality (or at least external reality).

However, many people dont really want to know how their minds work and one does find out things about oneself that one might rather not know.

That would be an argument in favor of recognizing the PET scan studies I'm referring to, and to ask yourself why a person who is texting while driving can, in a matter of moments, achieve similar results that took a seasoned adherent to Buddhist meditation practices years to achieve. Further, if the closing down of recirculating pulses in the self-awareness center of the brain indeed produces the sense of Oneness with the All, as explained and demonstrated in the cites, is true, then we are left to wonder how Buddhist meditants may be faced with that same thing, of preferring not to know that some other construct is in place, which trumps the metaphysical explanation with something material and physical.

Most of that article seems to be about people experiencing some sort of phenomena when their brains are interfered with in some fashion. I have no doubt that that is possible, but i dont see how it has much at all to do with meditation as a tool for greater self knowledge, better physical health and longevity.

One of the brain injury patients admitted that his psychological changes resulted in him "simple becoming a better person" (the Jewish fellow who saw the Virgin Mary while staring at the ceiling, as I recall). I think the fundamental question here is whether the nature of consciousness emanates from physical causes, which seems to be true, and then the next level of questions, the ones which ask how we can exploit that knowledge for the benefits you mention, follow from any number of ways this brain quieting can be induced, and exploited. For example, imagine a world where a communion of congregants the size of, say, the Catholic Church, would abandon all superstition and preference for metaphysics, and learn a simpler and more direct means of quieting those selected regions of the brain than the Buddhist one. Some may see the Virgin Mary, despite their previous religious point of view (or lack thereof). Some may need no more than a sense of being one with nature to "simply be a better person". And then again, they may shy away from Buddhism for some of the reasons I do. But if the end result is good (more disadvantaged people get housed and fed, more people go "visit the sick and in prison" and more people enroll in medical careers that strive to heal brain injuries, etc. . . then it probably wouldn't matter if Buddhism disappeared from the face of the Earth -- or should I say "came up to speed with modern neurology" or something along those lines.

 

[Spellbound]

"Those are my opinions, if you don't like them, I have more." (Groucho Marx).

And yes, there is no God. Every conception of God is a human invention, therefore every God so described is imaginary. Therefore God cannot possibly exist any more than the Tooth Fairy can exist. Arbitrarily deciding that the converse is true does not make it true. You simply end up in the same quagmire, looping on the imagination again.

And yes, the states of the meditant can be described as delusional. For example, the sense of Oneness with external reality is understood to be the response to quieting the self-awareness centers of the brain. I think delusion within a delusion is closer. I'm trying to be candid without raising hackles. It's just that I can't think of any way to gloss over this without losing the meaning.

You are wrong. Of course. Idiot.

 

[Sarkus]

You are wrong. Of course. Idiot.

Stunning argument. Thanks for the contribution.
Do you have any further gems of such insightfulness?

 

[gmilam]

No materialist has offered an explanation. They merely claim that so-called mental phenomena are physical processes. There is ample evidence for this position.

I would go so far as to say the fact that drugs can have such a profound affect on the mind confirms the idea that mind is firmly rooted in the physical.

 

[fogpipe]

then it probably wouldn't matter if Buddhism disappeared from the face of the Earth -- or should I say "came up to speed with modern neurology" or something along those lines.

Apparently we are talking about entirely different things here. The reality that can be seen here http://www.sciencedaily.com/search/?keyword=meditation which seems to be keeping up rather nicely with the modern world and what ever it is you are talking about, which im just not getting. If believing as you do makes you happy, im ok with it

 

[iceaura]

That still leaves it to decide if the pulses "tickle consciousness out of the aether" -- which seems to be the idea of the folks who link consciousness to the cosmos -- or whether the nature of a pulse simply lends itself to circulation in a keep alive circuit, and that there is no electromagnetic interface to the cosmos

We know for sure that if electromagnetic entities exist, the or a cosmos exists, and the high level patterns supported by neural synapse firing in a human brain exist, that there is at least one interface between them. It's the retina of the human eyeball. And we know similarly that the interface so named mediates significant influences - experiments with sensory deprivation tanks on the one hand, and complex visual stimulation via controlled screen on the other, have demonstrated that in the lab.

If I could stitch ten neurons together in a loop, and then introduce an exciting pulse, then I should be able to predict the way this would look on, say, an oscilloscope. From this point of view, it's the delay through each cell that's creating the pulse recirculation . . . that plus the fact that it's wired as a loop. So while I could say the infrastructure is the cause, that would seem kind of trivial.

It might also mislead - you might overlook the nature of the excitation pulse or pulses. Different ones - different in strength, duration, structure of strength along the duration, etc - will probably, unless you have been careful and foresighted in your setup, create different firing patterns in the circuit. This has bearing on the nature of attributable "cause" for any given pattern.

Mind that various identifiable and separable regions of the brain are connected - they send very complex patterns of patterns of pulses to each other, all the time. That may be the advantage of setting them up as partially separate - the complexity of overall response is increased by 1) subdividing and 2) establishing the right sized channels of communication between the subdivisions. That creates a substrate capable of supporting a virtual ecosystem of firing patterns.

That introduces evolutionary ratcheting and complexity bootstrapping to the toolkit of scientific explication. Cause and effect is no longer the only mode of scientific analysis.

Which informs this:

Right. The stuff I posted from NPR takes this thread to a another level, in that it suggests that habitual practices (religious ritual, to include prayer & meditation) seem to actually steer the way the synaptic junctions grow together, to reshape the brain, as if to say all such practices physically reinforce the beliefs that engendered them.

Or, from an evolutionary ratchet pov, practices that (by stages) bring about the adjustment of synaptic junction patterns into a substrate structure that better supports the high level patterns that brought about the practices in the first place, tend to persist and encroach - they become through chance and time in the big world vertically integrated into a structure with stabilizing roots at all pattern levels in all substrates including the outer world's. Music becomes important reinforcement. Food ingestion patterns. This is, in abstraction, a reproductive loop - "alternation of generations" - rooted in (supported by) an ecosystem of several levels of pattern in a variety of substrates. So is a mushroom.

The neurons might be considered a physical substrate, but additional functionality doesn't necessarily appear until after the junctions are connected -- and that generally requires sensory stimulation. So cause and effect can be considered from these different levels. We might say a junction is caused by learning, or we might say it's caused by the innate curiosity that hardwired intelligence, and therefore the genetic bootstrap is the chief cause, but then that can be attributed to the DNA and so forth.

In what I am regarding as analogous situations - other arenas of scientific research - the word "cause" is applied at the level of the pattern being "caused". One does not regard the flight of a baseball as "caused" by quantum level, particle level, atomic level, or molecular level, patterns, but by the patterns at the level of Newtonian force and macroscopic physical structure and thermodynamic properties - the level at which a "baseball" exists in the first place.

Now subatomic level patterns do constrain the behavior of a baseball - it will not very often or repeatably sift its molecules directly through the bat and reform on the other side, for example (never mind Joe Mauer's year at the plate) - but they do not in any reasonable sense "cause" any particular pattern of behavior. Not in a scientific sense, say. One is not behaving scientifically by attributing the flight of a baseball to quantum level patterns, and unscientifically by talking about bat speed and spin and air temperature.

And one is not behaving scientifically by looking for the "cause" of high level mental entities in static structures comprised of neural synapses and their connections. "In dreams begin responsibilities" would be a much more reasonable, scientific, approach.

side comment: a short story by Ursula LeGuin titled "the nna mmoy language" offers another or extension of view worth checking out.

 

[Yazata]

Deleted post. I was confusing two different people who post here.