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

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

#161

Post by namero999 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #158

namero999 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coor…

Correlation does not mean causation, and I am baffled that this needs be repeated here on this forum over and over again. If you throw a bottle into the television, are you effectively convinced that you have just disrupted the broadcast signal or do you entertain the possibility that you have simply messed up enough the proxy by which you were registering the signal? This is not woo. This is intellectual honesty. You seem skeptic and rational judging by what you write. Go all the way. We simply don't know that brain causes consciousness. We just don't, and I'm the first not happy about the possibility that it may not be the case, but I must accept rationally that there's all kind of holes in the brain-causes-consciousness narrative. By that account, for instance, every reduction in brain activity should correspond to a reduction of consciousness. Well, this is not the case, see for instance Carhart-Harris et al 2012, 2016 and many others more recently. Moreover, NDEs reports demonstrate enormous level of conscious experience in the absence of any brain activity. There's no space where to fit this empirical evidences in the causal framework.

Moreover, to believe in the fairy tale of physicalism implies accepting that the building blocks of such worldview (fundamental particles) pop up into existence out of thin air, that the universe is made mostly of "dark energy", and that experiential properties "emerge" from unconscious matter... is this the kind of woo you were referring to when you mentioned damaged reasoning ability?

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

#162

Post by namero999 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 10:04 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #158

namero999 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coor…

And forgot to add, everything you mention here has empirical evidence of not being conclusive. Read about acquired savant syndrome (for instance Lythgoe et al 2005 or Treffert 2006) where severe brain injuries and impairments corresponded to acquired genius-level mathematical abilities, hyper-proficient linguistic or artistic skills, etc.

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

#163

Post by namero999 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 10:20 PM UTC

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…

No one is conflating consciousness with mysticism other than you here. It's not about feeling special like I'm sure you think it is. It's about a phenomenon that science cannot explain, and to think that it is explained by some low-resolution correlations or "intuitive" associations is indeed damaging what science stands for. This attitude is religious faith at its best (or worse).

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

#164

Post by xvedejas » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 10:22 PM 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.

Well, that's my point. If you can't detect it, it's not a difference.

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

#165

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

namero999 wrote: post #161

ncmncm wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coor…

Correlation does not mean causation, and I am baffled that this needs be repeated here on this forum over and over again. If you throw a bottle into the television, are you effectively convinced that you have just disrupted the broadcast signal or do you entertain the possibility that you have simply messed up enough the proxy by which you were registering the signal? This is not woo. This is intellectual honesty. Yo…

Really? "Fairy tale of physicalism"?

What have you got against fairies? Can you prove that fairies don't exist? Can you prove that fairies are not the true manifestation of consciousness? Can you prove that you, yourself, are not a fairy who is extremely confused? Woo.

Dressing up religion as sense never turns out well for religion or sense.

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

#166

Post by ncmncm » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

namero999 wrote: post #163

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…

No one is conflating consciousness with mysticism other than you here. It's not about feeling special like I'm sure you think it is. It's about a phenomenon that science cannot explain, and to think that it is explained by some low-resolution correlations or "intuitive" associations is indeed damaging what science stands for. This attitude is religious faith at its best (or worse).

Next you will be saying termite mounds aren't really built by termites, and that we only imagine they are because we often find termites all through them. ("Even more often, we don't! Explain that!")

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

#167

Post by abellerose » Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

kordlessagain wrote: post #109

ncmncm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither sentence means anything at all.

You probably have image recall. Some people have audio recall. The recall events can contain imagery, moving imagery, sounds, speech, thoughts during event. They may be historic recordings/memory, creative "visualizations" or a hybrid. Some people can insert objects into their version of reality. Dots on walls. Boxes on tables. Your internally perceived reality is a "visualized+ object" that is similar to a visual an…

None of what you wrote means anything for the question.

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

#168

Post by namero999 » Fri, Oct 30, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #166

namero999 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is conflating consciousness with mysticism other than you here. It's not about feeling special like I'm sure you think it is. It's about a phenomenon that science cannot explain, and to think that it is explained by some low-resolution correlations or "intuitive" associations is indeed damaging what science stands for. This attitude is religious faith at its best (or worse).

Next you will be saying termite mounds aren't really built by termites, and that we only imagine they are because we often find termites all through them. ("Even more often, we don't! Explain that!")

Of course I am not going to say that. There is a precise, empirical, causal account of how mounds are built by termites, we can actually see them during the build process, and we don't have to do any category jump in order to understand that process. It's definitely not a good analogy for the absurd category jump which posits that an electron jumps to a different potential orbital and I experience redness.

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

#169

Post by namero999 » Fri, Oct 30, 2020, 10:42 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #165

namero999 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation does not mean causation, and I am baffled that this needs be repeated here on this forum over and over again. If you throw a bottle into the television, are you effectively convinced that you have just disrupted the broadcast signal or do you entertain the possibility that you have simply messed up enough the proxy by which you were registering the signal? This is not woo. This is intellectual honesty. Yo…

Really? "Fairy tale of physicalism"? What have you got against fairies? Can you prove that fairies don't exist? Can you prove that fairies are not the true manifestation of consciousness? Can you prove that you, yourself, are not a fairy who is extremely confused? Woo. Dressing up religion as sense never turns out well for religion or sense.

Again, it's not religion, it's intellectual honesty. I am not interested in demonstrating that consciousness is or is not woo. It's clearly something we don't understand, and at the same time I am perfectly comfortable in accepting the "placeholder" descriptions we have of the current mysteries of reality (like the above mentioned) since we can't do better right now.

What I am interested into is exposing the double standards of materialists/physicalists whose world view is based on even more woo, it's way less parsimonious, leaves out the most in-your-face phenomenon we observe, and when it makes the huge mistake to venture into philosophy/metaphysics like many militant materialists like to do, it's even internally inconsistent.

It's a shame, because science is not supposed to be a religion. We should be looking past our own nose tip.

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

#170

Post by ncmncm » Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

namero999 wrote: post #169

ncmncm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? "Fairy tale of physicalism"? What have you got against fairies? Can you prove that fairies don't exist? Can you prove that fairies are not the true manifestation of consciousness? Can you prove that you, yourself, are not a fairy who is extremely confused? Woo. Dressing up religion as sense never turns out well for religion or sense.

Again, it's not religion, it's intellectual honesty. I am not interested in demonstrating that consciousness is or is not woo. It's clearly something we don't understand, and at the same time I am perfectly comfortable in accepting the "placeholder" descriptions we have of the current mysteries of reality (like the above mentioned) since we can't do better right now. What I am interested into is exposing the double s…

BS is BS is BS is BS.

But, sure, flat-earth creationist moon-landing denialism is engaging and zero-calorie fun. You can twiddle away your life and not interfere with people actually, you know, doing things.