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Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

nautil.us

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Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#91

Post by amarte »

bawolff wrote: post #85
amarte wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve." I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some s…

That's a bit of a jump from no internal representation to no embodiment (whatever embodiment means in this context as that is pretty unclear to me)

I take internal representation to be an aspect of "embodiment", which you could also call the experience of being in the first person. If some idea is being represented internally, then it is being experienced, and the sum total of all these different experiences happening together (seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling etc..) are what you could call "embodiment".

I think philosophy is a difficult subject partially because people use different terms, or sometimes their own unique terms, to describe subtle and complex ideas.

When I mentioned embodiment, I was referring to the experience of being in the first person while feeling hot or cold, seeing colors and objects, hearing the sound your keyboard makes when you press keys, feeling the keys with the tips of your fingers, etc. All of that together at once.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#92

Post by DennisP »

captainmuon wrote: post #58
DennisP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation.

But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We could be like robots, behaving exactly the same as our nerve impulses move us around, with no inner experience at all.

And what about electrical impulses in things other than brains? Are there qualia associated with them? Is there something it's like to be a computer, light bulb, thermostat, lightning bolt, or rock? If not, why not?

If you and I both see that 450nm light, how do you know that I'm not having an experience of color that you have in response to 700nm, i.e. red? Maybe the rainbow of colors is upside-down in my experience compared to yours. Maybe my qualia are different entirely. We have no way to prove anything different, because all we can measure is the electrical impulses. And because we haven't the faintest hint of a theory that connects the physical stuff to the particulars of the conscious experience.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#93

Post by op03 »

bserge wrote: post #2

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…

Language is probably a prereq.

You can't be in great battles with yourself without language arising. So where ever language arises, Consciousness of some sort follows.

Ants I doubt have great self control problems cause language hardware is primitive.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#94

Post by mannykannot »

raducu wrote: post #90
amarte wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve." I don't think this is necessarily true. It seems to me like the universe would get on exactly the same without internal representation. By "internal representation" I mean a universe without "embodiment" -- no experience of being me or being you, no feelings felt, no colors seen, no sounds heard, etc.. And yet those experiences "exist" in some s…

1) The issue of what perceptions "actually" are will be impossible to answer because qualia are ireductible. Let me explain: you feel pain in your foot. As a scientist I cut your foot and you no longer feel pain in your foot. Or I cut the pain nerves, or the spinal cord, or give you pain medicine. Or I find a brain receptor and a chemical responsible for pain. Or in the future, we find a couple of brain networks that…

> But WHO is actually feeling that sensation?

This reminds me of a story from Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls. An early multiuser computer system did fine with a small number of users, but choked when one more was added, above a certain threshold. "No problem", said some wag "just find where that threshold is stored and increase it." The joke, of course, is that the number didn't exist as an explicitly-realized value; it emerged as a phenomenon out of how the system as a whole ran.

When you are in pain, your conscious mind - an emergent phenomenon from the physical processes of your body (primarily the brain), or so I suspect - observes itself. There is nothing mysterious in systems observing themselves; that's what a computer doing when it raises and responds to a segfault, for example.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#95

Post by thechao »

DennisP wrote: post #92
captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We coul…

> You get a pattern of electrical impulses.

Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure.

Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexity might be another 10 or 12 orders of magnitude. I don't think it's any stretch of the imagination to believe qualia arise somewhere between "uniform black body emitter" and "human brain learning and experiencing over time".

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#96

Post by DennisP »

bawolff wrote: post #82
captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

I've sometimes wondered if people precieve things qualitatively different way then I do to give rise to this problem, since to me it seems like s non-problem. To me, i have trouble even conceptualizing what is meant by the qualia problem. What is the fundamental difference between something's "redness" and say a tall person's "tallness". Maybe "redness" is a bit more mysterious because its non-spatial, but still is i…

Tallness is a physical property of the thing itself.

Light also has its own physical properties, e.g. a wavelength of 700nm. But the qualia of red is the experience you have when that 700nm light hits your retina.

It's conceivable that when 700nm light hits my retina, I have an experience which you would call "blue." That's why the qualia and the physical property of the light are two different things.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#97

Post by ShellfishMeme »

raducu wrote: post #79
captainmuon wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Franky, I have never understood the problem of qualia - or why it is something in need of explanation at all. Maybe the correct answer is an "anthropic principle"-style non-answer: External stimuli have to affect the human brain and body somehow . There has got to be some internal representation of what you percieve. Now we have the capability of reflection. To some extent, we can think about how we think, and we can…

The problem with qualia, as I understand it, is that we can build machines that process images, and in the future let's say, can exceed what cat is capable of, but that machine will never actually have sensations. So there are two issues: what sensations actually are and why was it necessary for life to have those sensations, after all, a robot cat would do just fine without any sensation, just processing the inputs…

You say the machine wouldn't have sensations. Yet a cat and a human also are just complex machines. Maybe being a sufficiently complex machine is all that is needed to have sensations.

And if we could imagine for example that an ant or a fly actually experiences things, if it too has some sort of degree of what we as humans have when we see or hear things, maybe there actually already are machines that "see" and "experience" things.

The difference might just be that we as humans have the extra layer of meta observation that allows us to reason about our experience in the context of the world and turn us into an active participant in that experience while an ant or a neural network are mostly just passive observers even though they too make decisions and process information.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#98

Post by DennisP »

thechao wrote: post #95
DennisP wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be an internal representation for the organism to function properly. E.g. if light with a 450nm wavelength hits your retina, certain neurons fire. You get a pattern of electrical impulses. There's your internal representation. But why does that representation also carry with it an experience of the color blue? Why isn't it just the electrical impulses and that's it? The organism would still work. We coul…

> You get a pattern of electrical impulses. Is there something else in the brain that's not just protein cascades and electrical impulses? I'd be interested in a published paper describing this structure. Barring that, yes, experience really is just protein cascades and electrical impulses. A light bulb is orders of magnitude simpler — easily 10 or 12, maybe more; and, that's just spatial; the spatiotemporal complexi…

That's often people's assumption, that at some level of complexity, qualia just show up. But we don't actually have a clue why that might be the case, or how it happens, or why a pile of atoms banging against their neighbors should be considered a larger whole which thus has complexity and therefore consciousness.

People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism.

And it's not true that there are no options besides simple materialism and crazy woo. E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience; you can believe that without believing anything contrary to physics. There are all sorts of possibilities being explored by people who grapple with these questions, instead of just assuming an answer.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#99

Post by ncmncm »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #49
ncmncm wrote: post #39

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.

Cars, when driving, have speed that is a continuous, seamless "whole". Therefore, the driver, engine, and wheels have nothing to do with speed because they are parts? Or, the driver must be connected to the wheels via magickal electromagnetic fields?

It is meaningless even to say.

Re: Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

#100

Post by ncmncm »

kozd wrote: post #70
abellerose wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has proven consciousness is even real. It’s like people assuming they have free will.

You have direct access to your own subjective experience. Do you deny that it is like something to be you?

Neither sentence means anything at all.
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