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What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

nautil.us

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Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#41

Post by zubspace »

krapp wrote: post #26
zubspace wrote: post #23

What I find fascinating about consciousness is that it seems to be bound to your location. But how and why? Why are you inside of your body and not in someone elses? The article poses this question, but leaves it unanswered. For me it begs the question: If conscousness is bound to a location, is it possible to transfer consciousness from one entity to another? Is there some kind of thing we did not yet detect? What h…

This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness. Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your…

I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is not constructive. That was not my intent.

Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this head we are in? There are 8 billion heads, why this one?

I'm not arguing for a soul or something. But I find it intruiging, that there had to be a mechanism which made your inner eye spawn at the place, where it now is. Only, what mechanism? Can it be explained physically? In my opinion it has to be, but maybe we missed it up to now

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#42

Post by bekantan »

willis936 wrote: post #30

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

Honest question: following this argument, is it to be expected that a sufficiently complex water pipeline can become conscious?

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#43

Post by jokoon »

Sometimes it seems wordd don't have good definitions, at least when they can be challenged by science.

Language is mostly usage. For example we don't have a good definition of what intelligence is, on the scientific level. It might be the same thing for consciousness.

We only understand intelligence or consciousness as what we see as a soul or ghost, but nothing much.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#44

Post by toshk »

willis936 wrote: post #30

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

From one of the dominant theories of a material view indeed an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

But from our daily experiences actually reality is an emergent property from our consciousness (or awareness).

What we do feel, smell, hear, forms into concept, meaning, experiences forms our "reality".

There might be a theoretical other "reality" or it might be a bit different many think it is now, but it doesn't make it more or less real, in the sense of actual experience it's less real.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#45

Post by ed-209 »

Theorizing about the nature of consciousness without having been subjected to it's multitude of altered states is an obvious waste of time. If you can't or won't venture into the "field", then at least have the humility to address the aggregate experiential data of those who have.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#46

Post by spupe »

willis936 wrote: post #30

If you really want the answer then you need to be prepared to face some tough truths. There is no magic. Consciousness is an illusion. It's an emergent behavior from an incredibly complex neural automata.

Consciousness is not an illusion, it is a real phenomenon that is experienced daily by almost every human. You might be referring to free will and its subjective experience, which is a different story.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#47

Post by misja111 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #8

> One point on which you both clearly agree is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon, It probably is but I wouldn't be so sure it is. I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess. > we have the ineffable experience of being alive in this world The experience of being, and the experience of attributes like "alive" and in "somewhere in particular" are separat…

> I have neither a feeling nor a rationally logical proof of this idea. It's just an intuitive guess.

This intuition, that there is something special and unique about what 'we' are, is baked into our brains by many thousands of years of evolution, and this makes it so extremely difficult for us to believe that there's nothing more to us then a bunch of molecules. This is why people have invented theories about souls, reincarnation, collective consciousness and what not.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#48

Post by noiv »

xweber wrote: post #2

Thanks for the link. I agree with Seth that consciousness is much like a controlled hallucination - after all, we don't experience reality directly, but through the predictions of our brain. But then the question is, why do you need this hallucination? I suspect that consciousness evolved because it makes an organism more capable than one who doesn't. But what does consciousness offer over just taking in sensory inpu…

I think the most simple explanation is the brain runs a simulation of its environment and at some point after birth it puts its human into this simulation. That's probably when children start using the word 'I' and raise a consciousness.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#49

Post by spupe »

zubspace wrote: post #41
krapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only fascinating if you refuse to accept a non-supernatural or non-metaphysical definition of consciousness. Otherwise, most of these questions become trivial when consciousness is considered as a physical, biological process bound to the brain. Why is consciousness bound to a person's location? Because their brain is bound inside their skull. Why are you inside your body and not someone else's? Because your…

I can completely follow your logic. And I completely agree that going supernatural or decending into a soul-debate is not constructive. That was not my intent. Still, you and I can probably agree to some extent, that there is an inner eye inside of our heads looking outside. It also makes sense to me, that those processes could spawn from a feedback loop inside of a brain. Still. why did this inner eye spawn in this…

Your "mind's eye" is getting information from your actual eyes through your optic nerves and cortex. This is how we know it is a physical mechanism, we can affect it in predictable ways with lesions, drugs and other physical methods.

Re: What’s so hard about understanding consciousness?

#50

Post by Sosh101 »

lisper wrote: post #14

> If you are feeling pain, for example, this gives you very actionable knowledge about what you should do next in order to survive. This seems exactly backwards to me. The visceral sensation of pain exists precisely in order to bypass your conscious decision-making. When you're hurting, your body doesn't want you to start weighing the pros and cons of various courses of action, it wants you to deal with the injury ri…

I agree with you. But it seems that pain probably existed before higher reasoning (since it's a associated with the older parts of the brain), so it's a bit of a puzzle. Maybe early on the pain mechanisms existed without the associated qualia, or maybe pain also forces other control systems to be bypassed.
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