51–60 of 172 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. Your DNA is made of atoms. Those are parts. Your cells are made of proteins and fats. Those are parts. Your computer is made of transistors and wires. Those are parts. Cities are made of people, buildings, and streets. Those are parts.
What premise of my argument are you objecting to? Nothing you have said appears to contradict anything I have said. I obviously agree that the body is made out of many individual parts at all levels of analysis.
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The br…
That's not necessarily true. We experience vision as a unified whole as well, but we have a blind spot as well. How would you argue that consciousness is a seamless whole and not just the illusion of one?
Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contrib…
Thanks for sharing. My own pet theory is very similar to yours: humans evolved consciousness in order to ‘observe’ our cognitive and emotional state, so that we can build models and apply them to reason about other people’s cognitive and emotional states. It’s hard to have ‘theory of mind’ about someone else when you don’t have access to your own mind to start with.
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The br…
Yes, let's move the soul from being an emergent property of the staggeringly complex arrangement of billions of neurons to their electromagnetic byproducts. It's cool because instead of grappling with the consequences of material reality we can satisfy our dualists instincts by ascribing consciousness to mystic energy despite it being equally mechanistic in the eyes of modern science. I want to see the college debate…
This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.
Well it's an easier read than this: https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa016/5909853 but it lacks details. Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it? Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and…
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert. We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of b…
Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2]. Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contrib…
There are actually two problems, that people often mix up. One is how we get a sense of self, which I think is what you're talking about. Another is how qualia, like the perception of color, arise at all. Nobody seems to have any idea how that happens; we have no way to map some arrangement of atoms to a perception and prove from first principles that one leads to another.
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The br…
I disagree, it seems to be totally disrupted by general anesthesia. Having experienced it, from my perspective it was time travel in a way that normal sleep never is. When you wake up from sleep there is some perception of time passed, and therefore a sort of continuity. Not so under general anesthesia. The time spent under is simply gone without even leaving a sensation of a missing gap.
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness: The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness. The br…
>Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. That's not necessarily true. We experience vision as a unified whole as well, but we have a blind spot as well. How would you argue that consciousness is a seamless whole and not just the illusion of one?