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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?

#151

Post by namero999 »

ncmncm wrote: post #101
virmundi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you prove that conscious is an emergent property of the bio-chemical brain? If you can, there is a sweet noble waiting for you. Otherwise it’s speculation on your part.

A sweet Nobel for demonstrating that people have experiences, despite being made out of base matter? People do have experiences, and are made out of matter. QED. I will expect your nomination.

Firefighters are always present where there is a fire. Therefore, firefighters are those who lights up the fires.

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

#152

Post by mannykannot »

raducu wrote: post #146
mannykannot wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 valu…

I'm not saying it is incorrect, but the emergent theory of self-awareness is a bit hand-wavy. Surely a primitive man could say an airplane flying is an emergent property of the airpland, like Aristotle said about many things? I was just questioning the level of satisfaction we would get as science would reach the best explanation of what sensations are. I think right now we are nowhere near that scientific knowledge.

Considerable vagueness is to be expected in any field so far from an explanation, and the situation is even worse in the dualist camp: to the best of my knowledge, they have never been able to offer one definite, affirmative claim about how the alleged non-physical aspects of the mind work. All they do is weave tendentious arguments against there ever being a physical explanation of the mind.

Emergent phenomena are pervasive in complex systems, and this stands as an effective response to naive dualist misconceptions such as that materialism requires that a quale must be identical with a single physical thing.

Even in airplanes, behavioral traits such as stability emerge from the interaction of several physical features.

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

#153

Post by hackinthebochs »

ncmncm wrote: post #144
hackinthebochs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Minding is activity brains perform, exactly as motion is activity cars perform. This is a contentious claim, for which you have provided no arguments. Unsupported assertions are entirely useless in this discussion. My argument is very clear and straightforward. If you disagree, you should point out which premise you disagree with and why. Unspecific incredulity does not make an argument. Note that my claim that cons…

You appear to imagine that something you think of as "EM fields" can achieve things that cannot be done with wires or axons and transistors or nerve cells. EM fields are linear. That means you can't get any information out of EM interactions [except in ferromagnetic materials] that you didn't put in. It makes them useful for communication, but not for computation, or "consciousness", whatever woowoo you imagine that…

Again, your comment completely fails to demonstrate comprehension of my argument. It's not a complex argument. I don't know why you fill it in with nonsense and then disparage your made up nonsense. What a waste of effort!

The specific thing that EM fields can do that axons or transistors cannot do is provide "intrinsic unity", the seamless cohesion that underpins the unified whole of conscious experience. This is because the EM field is itself a unified whole. The computational aspects of consciousness are still found in the dynamics of neurons.

Again, I was very specific in the argument about what property of the EM field I'm referencing. I'm not sure why you insist on battling strawmen. But increasingly obtuse and indignant responses do not make an argument. So you should really abandon that shtick.

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

#154

Post by ncmncm »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #153
ncmncm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to imagine that something you think of as "EM fields" can achieve things that cannot be done with wires or axons and transistors or nerve cells. EM fields are linear. That means you can't get any information out of EM interactions [except in ferromagnetic materials] that you didn't put in. It makes them useful for communication, but not for computation, or "consciousness", whatever woowoo you imagine that…

Again, your comment completely fails to demonstrate comprehension of my argument. It's not a complex argument. I don't know why you fill it in with nonsense and then disparage your made up nonsense. What a waste of effort! The specific thing that EM fields can do that axons or transistors cannot do is provide "intrinsic unity", the seamless cohesion that underpins the unified whole of conscious experience. This is be…

"Intrinsic unity" is woo. "Seamless cohesion" is woo. "Unified whole of conscious experience" is woo.

There will never be a theory of undefined term. Seeking a scientific blessing for your religion is barking up the wrong tree. Science doesn't issue blessings.

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

#155

Post by abeppu »

mjangle1985 wrote: post #125
abeppu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on why you think epiphenominalism is the most reasonable explanation for consciousness? My point of confusion with the epiphenominal view point is if mental states aren't at all causal, why should they exist at all? It seems like a clever way of compromising on the ontological question ("your mind is _kind of_ real"), but if mental states can't _do_ anything, then why should physical life develop th…

>then why should physical life develop them? The comparison I've always liked is the "steam whistle set off by a locomotive". The steam whistle has no causal efficacy on the locomotive but is a waste byproduct of a steam engine. Consciousness shouldn't have any causal effect on physical processes (assuming a strictly materialist framework), if it's explained as a byproduct of functioning physical processes it tends t…

I'm still confused. The steam whistle is built intentionally, alongside the locomotive, and together the train serves a clear, externally imposed purpose. The whistle doesn't impact the function on the engine, but a train with a whistle was decided to be a better train, because it does casually interact with the train's environment.

I get the ontological claim that mental states are real but cannot cause effects on physical states. But it seems unsatisfactory to claim that these rich, real but non causal states just happen to arise, without purpose, in only some physical systems, without further explanation.

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

#156

Post by hackinthebochs »

ncmncm wrote: post #154
hackinthebochs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, your comment completely fails to demonstrate comprehension of my argument. It's not a complex argument. I don't know why you fill it in with nonsense and then disparage your made up nonsense. What a waste of effort! The specific thing that EM fields can do that axons or transistors cannot do is provide "intrinsic unity", the seamless cohesion that underpins the unified whole of conscious experience. This is be…

"Intrinsic unity" is woo . "Seamless cohesion" is woo . "Unified whole of conscious experience" is woo . There will never be a theory of undefined term . Seeking a scientific blessing for your religion is barking up the wrong tree. Science doesn't issue blessings.

These aren't undefined terms. It might help if you read even a little bit on philosophy of mind so you can be familiar with the common usage of such terms before dismissing them. But that's really not necessary as these terms aren't jargon heavy.

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

#157

Post by ncmncm »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #156
ncmncm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intrinsic unity" is woo . "Seamless cohesion" is woo . "Unified whole of conscious experience" is woo . There will never be a theory of undefined term . Seeking a scientific blessing for your religion is barking up the wrong tree. Science doesn't issue blessings.

These aren't undefined terms. It might help if you read even a little bit on philosophy of mind so you can be familiar with the common usage of such terms before dismissing them. But that's really not necessary as these terms aren't jargon heavy.

"Philosophy of mind"? Thank you for the warning, I will steer clear. BS is not a thing I seek out.

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

#158

Post by ncmncm »

namero999 wrote: post #151
ncmncm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sweet Nobel for demonstrating that people have experiences, despite being made out of base matter? People do have experiences, and are made out of matter. QED. I will expect your nomination.

Firefighters are always present where there is a fire. Therefore, firefighters are those who lights up the fires.

A little bit of awareness of cause and effect goes a long way.

If your speech center is damaged, your speech is impaired. If your audio processing center is damaged, your hearing is impaired. If your visual cortex is damaged, your vision is impaired. If your hippocampus is damaged, memory formation is impaired. If your frontal lobes are damaged, your judgement is impaired. If your cerebellum is damaged, physical coordination is impaired. If your reasoning ability is damaged, you believe in woo.

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

#159

Post by ordu »

bserge wrote: post #24
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…

The articles are more focused on how the brain works , which imo is equally as important (though not as interesting for me), for purposes of copying/replicating consciousness/intelligence, for example.

Maybe it is important to replicating consciousness, maybe it is not. At some point people thought that an ability to perform arithmetic operation is an exclusive ability of a human mind, but then machines grown to perform calculations better than humans without need to replicate human mind itself.

Maybe consciousness is like calculations? Maybe to replicate it we need to understand it, not the underlying mechanisms of a particular device (brain) with an ability to be conscious?

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

#160

Post by DennisP »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #147
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…

Is the question about qualia even a meaningful one? It feels to me like running a program twice and asking whether it's really the same program that was run, given that each time, the addresses of library functions the program used were different[0]. It could be that when you see 450nm light, the pathways in your brain that process this information correspond to the pathways that respond to 700nm light in my head. Bu…

I would say the question of qualia is meaningful, in the sense that a good answer might teach us something about the nature of reality. It's just not a practical question.

However, it might become a practical question, if someday we have to decide whether AGI should have rights, or whether we think a human uploaded to silicon would have qualia.

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