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Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

nautil.us

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Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#281

Post by 2snakes »

bowsamic wrote: post #151
2snakes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. In Kastrup's idealism, a scalpel, for example, is actually a transpersonal mental process. So it modifies brain-consciousness much like an emotion or thought modifies other thoughts.

No, the scalpel doesn’t actually exist except as an idea in the mind that is attached to, thus it can’t be said to really exist in any way. It is empty of self existence (svahbhava), as is our own mind. Nothing has fundamental essence or identity

Sorry, I'm not a subjective idealist or a solipsist. I believe god consciousness is the final arbiter. And that we can expand our human consciousness to god consciousness. So I'm partial to objective idealism instead.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#282

Post by voxl »

bheadmaster wrote: post #41

I think that consciousness (or rather the feeling of consciousness) is very related to continuous long-term memory storing. When you're blackout drunk, or under anesthesia, your brain can still infer connections between sequential stimuli (e.g. you can understand words), but none of those memories stay in your brain long-term. I'd say that we were actually conscious during that period, but in the present moment we ha…

I think you're right on the money, continuous storage of long term memory + cognitive feedback of those memories _is_ consciousness in my book. We already know that decisions can happen before your conscious mind is aware, that's because consciousness isn't about this moment, it's about past moments, it's a feedback loop.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#283

Post by otikik »

tmountain wrote: post #160
upsidesinclude wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it fails the deeper you go in understanding physical phenomena. We should not exist per Occam. If you can hold on your awareness that the atoms of your body are not 'matter' but signatures of energy bound in a field, then the physical brain is much harder to consider the real and constructing element of reality. I think many of these discussions are just measuring the difference in what we each perceive as the…

Yeah, it's interesting to think about. I've often wondered what would happen if a structurally identical configuration of matter and energy representing "me" manifested somewhere. Taking it further, is the atomic world the only medium where this "me" could be represented? What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious? What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our n…

> What if there were a perfect digital model of "me"? Would that be conscious?

If it is a perfect digital model of you, yes. Since you feel consciousness, the digital copy must also feel it. Otherwise it would not be "perfect".

In the case of the model, "feeling" means that some bits (probably a big number - billions or trillions) inside the model would flip their state.

> What other mediums might be able to support something similar to our notion of consciousness?

I believe that the mind is sustained by a particular set of physical atoms. A human brain is ~1.5 liters of water plus ~0.5 kgs of other stuff.

In theory you could represent consciousness using whatever else physical objects you wanted. In practice, the mind-bogglingly big numbers and processes involved that make it difficult. If you used grains of sand to represent atoms, each neuron would take ~450 liters / 16 cubic feet of sand to model, assuming that you can make each individual grain of sand act as an atom.

There's also the fact that modeling how atoms behave exactly seems to be extremely computationally expensive. Apparently Quantum Mechanics don't like being modeled on a non-quantum computer, and you rapidly reach the "you would need a computer the size of the whole universe in order to model that" limit very quickly. So your grains of sand would need to be Quantum-aware Grains of Sand.

You might end up needing a Jupiter-worth of grains of Quantum sand. I don't recommend using this approach. Definitely don't try to model the human brain using pebbles.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#284

Post by keonix »

galacticaactual wrote: post #120
kahnclusions wrote: post #46

As far as we can tell consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the physical processes of the brain, and when you interrupt those processes, you don’t form new memories, and when you wake up it’s as if you time travelled to that point. Any other explanation involves a lot of hand-waving and vast unfounded assumptions that contradict the known laws of physics. My question for those cases is: how does it work? For exa…

Can you describe “good” and “evil” in a rigorously mathematical framework that makes testable predictions?

Sure! It's just a classification of events that each person has.

Testible prediction? Socially close people will have similar classifications as opposed to randomly chosen ones (I will leave defining metric space over possible classifications as an exercise to the reader)

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#285

Post by simonh »

bowsamic wrote: post #146
simonh wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When some physicalists talk about consciousness being an illusion, they're generally talking about the experience of being the centre of reality, they don't mean we don't have these experiences. They're addressing the fact that the brain isn't always conscious, that consciousness seems to go away completely in some situations, so for them it's not a permanent aspect of ourselves. That's all. I prefer not to use the '…

I think consciousness is the more fundamental thing, because it’s the only thing I ever have experience of, and that everything else arises from that (including the physical world). To me that’s the simplest explanation Taking a step further, I think neither consciousness nor physical reality really exists, it’s all emptiness (see Heart sutra)

I don’t see how that’s a simple explanation. We know we lose consciousness, totally, on a regular basis yet when we awake the world is still there. It’s always consistent and doesn’t radically change as our consciousness changes. We can set devices to record activity in the world while we are unconscious, and their recordings seem consistent. The simplest explanation seems to be that the world is real and persistent, but our consciousness is transient.

If the world arises from consciousness, we would expect that changes in conscious states would persistently alter consensus reality. But we never see that happen.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#286

Post by nickjj »

lisper wrote: post #212
nickjj wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if your identity can be restored after sleep and anesthesia, why not after death as well? I don't know the low level details about how the brain works but... When you're sleeping and are under anesthesia your brain is still an organ that's alive. Your body as a whole exists and is functioning. I don't think this can applied to death if our definition of death is that your skin, organs and cells decompose into no…

> Your identity can only be restored at this point if you believe your identity is fully detached from your brain, Right. > in which case then you may believe your identity will continue to exist in an unknown state that as far as I know has never been measured or confirmed in human history. Right again, but note that this conclusion turns on the absence of observation . It's possible that dualism is true and we just…

> So? My memory has gaps that can't be accounted for while I was awake.

Yeah, I can't tell you what I was doing at any specific minute of time 15 years ago but I can say I was alive back then, at least to a degree of what we generally accept as alive (ie. I'm ignoring any ideas of living in a simulation and not being alive, etc.).

I don't think memory alone is your identity but I personally think your brain needs to exist and be functioning in its normal state to be able to record and recall memories to a reasonable degree and if your brain decomposed to nothingness I don't think you can still have a brain driven memory.

It's also kind of interesting that we have this idea of your "mind's eye". We have a brain, we know a brain exists and we know where it exists within our body. One could say your inner voice is your consciousness right? It's your ability to understand your own self and world around you. To have an inner dialog and then dictate actions based on a combination of reason and impulses.

What's interesting to me is if you don't think about it, this dialog always happens behind your eyes. It feels like it's projected from where your brain physically exists. I think you can throw this inner voice to make it feel like it's coming from other parts of your body but that's only when you purposely try to do this.

To me this makes me highly think that your brain controls this inner voice and if your brain decomposes to nothingness then this goes with it.

Am I wrong? Maybe but I cannot accept that because something hasn't been proven then it may exist on nothing but faith alone.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#287

Post by simonh »

overlisted wrote: post #43
simonh wrote: post #8

How to approach loss of consciousness is one of the problems I have with non-materialist theories of consciousness like dualism and panpsychism. If consciousness is not generated by my physical brain, how come physical chemicals can manipulate my conscious state? If the brain is a receiver for consciousness, surely my consciousness should exist independently of my brain? Interfering with a radio doesn’t change what’s…

I'm a materialist myself, but I can think of one very fun theory that solves this. What if neurons are special antennas that can "connect" to your consciousness, and when you're, say, drunk, those antennas start receiving and transmitting wrong signals. Your consciousness is just fine in its world, but your body can't talk to it properly anymore. Obviously I'm just making stuff up, and I don't actually believe any of…

In that scenario, I don’t see why your body containing alcohol would change your conscious experience. Surely that would be like being fully alert and aware, but not able to fully control your body. If your body were in its own world, then there would be no reason for drunkenness to affect your awareness or decision making.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#288

Post by pas »

vinceguidry wrote: post #117
pas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't panpsychism orthogonal to materialism? Isn't the trivial solution in the non-material case just regular mumbo jumbo? Ie. the connection between the consciousness and the body is severed by propofol while it's active, and so memories are not formed to keep you sane, or whatever? It stops when it gets to Nirvana, etc? All the attempts to explain it with non-materialism seems to very bluntly fail Ockham's razor. S…

Occam's razor specifies that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity ." Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity. Therefore one must multiply the entities until one can arrive at a true, simple explanation with the fewest number of extant entities. The mind is not a physical thing, despite it being connected with and informed by the brain. Consciousness and the body cannot be separated, b…

> Materialism cannot be true, despite it's seeming simplicity

[citation needed]

The mind is not a physical thing, that's correct, but we need not claim the existence of anything non-material to explain the mind. The mind - or more specifically consciousness is made of information, which is 100% encoded in matter, hence materialism. (See Joscha Bach's detailed description of this.)

> But that 'pointing' isn't the actual system, it's an abstract thing that helps our minds understand the underlying system it's running on.

Yep, and that's platonism in a nutshell, but that doesn't contradict materialism either.

Entities are encoded in our brains.

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#289

Post by lisper »

nickjj wrote: post #286
lisper wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your identity can only be restored at this point if you believe your identity is fully detached from your brain, Right. > in which case then you may believe your identity will continue to exist in an unknown state that as far as I know has never been measured or confirmed in human history. Right again, but note that this conclusion turns on the absence of observation . It's possible that dualism is true and we just…

> So? My memory has gaps that can't be accounted for while I was awake. Yeah, I can't tell you what I was doing at any specific minute of time 15 years ago but I can say I was alive back then, at least to a degree of what we generally accept as alive (ie. I'm ignoring any ideas of living in a simulation and not being alive, etc.). I don't think memory alone is your identity but I personally think your brain needs to…

> I can say I was alive back then

But that's an inference, not a direct observation. It's possible you turned into a philosophical zombie temporarily without realizing it. How would you know?

> I personally think your brain needs to exist and be functioning in its normal state

Sure, but that still leaves open the possibility that the brain is just a transceiver and the actual locus of your self is somewhere else. That hypothesis is consistent with all observations.

> It feels like it's projected from where your brain physically exists.

Are you sure? Or is this just a reflection of your prejudices? How could you tell?

Re: Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?

#290

Post by galacticaactual »

keonix wrote: post #284
galacticaactual wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe “good” and “evil” in a rigorously mathematical framework that makes testable predictions?

Sure! It's just a classification of events that each person has. Testible prediction? Socially close people will have similar classifications as opposed to randomly chosen ones (I will leave defining metric space over possible classifications as an exercise to the reader)

So it’s completely subjective to you, AKA not anywhere near the testable physics that I was looking for.
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