Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness? • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by deepnotderp » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:23 AM UTC

323454 wrote: post #23

ordu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need? Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to…

Have a read of Blindsight by Peter Watts, it has an interesting take on this very idea. An alien species with advanced intelligence but not consciousness takes our attempts to communicate with it as an attack, intended to cause it to waste valuable resources on decoding our low information chatter. The implication is that consciousness is empty of content, merely supposed to be the relay from my subconscious processe…

Blindsight is also the name of a phenomenon that provides some evidence for the fascinating hypothesis that cognition and consciousness are at least to some degree, separate.

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

#112

Post by deepnotderp » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:25 AM UTC

falseprofit wrote: post #33

TheHideout wrote: post #8

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…

This sounds similar to claims I've heard that consciousness arises from language. Taking a component of our cognition which is heavily intertwined with the rest of it and taking its ubiquity to imply some sort of primacy.

Have you ever had a thought you can't put into words? Some people do not even possess an internal monologue!

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

#113

Post by vmception » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:39 AM UTC

My untested hypothesis is that fungi trigger an otherwise vestigial sense that allows us to perceive an energy that we have a symbiotic relationship with

The nature of the symbiotic relationship is not known, and the capabilities of this relationship have not been explored

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

#114

Post by mjangle1985 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

dbspin wrote: post #81

mjangle1985 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind? I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.

As a former psychology student (lol) I have to point out that an epiphenominal mind is perhaps the least parsimonious thing imaginable. It's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least. Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood - some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavi…

>t's also been effectively disproven since the cognitive revolution at least.

How so?

>Since we can understand ideas, take in / generate perceptions, and act in meaningful ways based on what we've understood

That's not necessarily 'proof' of consciousness or free will.

>some kind of raw behavioural conditioning is not a valid explanation for our behavior. Nor the behavior of most higher animals.

Behaviorism isn't epiphenomenalism. I'm concerned you might not understand what epiphenomenalism is.

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

#115

Post by Animats » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

Probably not, or humans would be much more sensitive to RF interference.

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

#116

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by bawolff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:53 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #96

bawolff wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you dont experience tallness as an objective property of the object. You view it relative to the scene, people who intimidate you appear taller, etc. The tallness might cause us different emotional experience too - maybe im intimidated, maybe it makes me feel safe, maybe it makes me feel trusting, etc

Its entirely possible that when the exact same light hits our eyes to form a scene, you and i would experience the tallness of the person in the scene differently.

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

#118

Post by peterbmarks » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:54 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #115

Probably not, or humans would be much more sensitive to RF interference.

Exactly. If this theory was correct an MRI would knock people unconscious very quickly you'd think.

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

#119

Post by mdifrgechd » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #98

thechao wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ther…

> E.g. it's possible that all matter has some level of conscious experience

I've tried to reason about this, and one hypothesis is that all matter has compulsions, like to get to lower gravitational potential energy, to react this way or that, etc. And that desire can be thought of as conciousness. So for more complex assemblies of matter, conciousness becomes the sum of those compulsions, but still reflects the sum of what the base components want to do - oxidize stuff, etc. But the point is, conciousness is the manifestation of the inherent desires we have, based on the rules of the universe.

Just a hypothesis of course, not testable, but my demonstration is that if you pour water into a maze with an outlet, it will solve it, based on its desire to reach a lower potential energy, and to make hydrogen bonds.

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

#120

Post by bawolff » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:02 AM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #107

xvedejas wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a lot of evidence of how people perceive color, and the differences of perception. There are tests that measure the ability to distinguish color. Some people are only colorblind in one eye, and report perceptual differences that are predictable by phenotype. I would expect any meaningful difference in qualia would have some conceivable (if not performable) test. Otherwise we're calling two equivalent things d…

I challenge you to devise a test able to detect that I perceive the color spectrum in reverse.

Is that a meaningful difference in qualia? Does a relabeling of what are arbitrary labelings change my subjective experience. Is precieving the colour spectrum in reverse even a meaningful statement? Or is it more like saying you can't prove i added 2+1 instead of 1+2.