No, really—consciousness is worth thinking about

There's a difference between intelligent criticism and nit-picking for nit-picking's sake. There's basically a guarantee that no matter how widely accepted a comment or post is, there will be a group of pedants ready to rip it apart in the comments section.

I'm not saying that changing the attitude of the community is necessary, or even possible, but it does get in the way of what otherwise might be stimulating discussion to have all the weeds of "oh you said Z comes after Y, but actually the alphabet has no concept of space, and you're a god damned idiot who should feel ashamed for even suggesting such a thing."

On a different subject, recently there were a spasm of interest in fMRI studies that showed that "free" choices could be predicted based on neural activity well before a "conscious choice" was made.[2][3][4]

The general consensus seemed to be "Hah! Take that, free will!"

My take on the results were that they were hardly a surprise, if consciousness is an activity of the brain. You should no more expect to make a conscious decision prior to displaying brain activity relating to the decision than you should expect to perceive a flash of light before the light bulb is lit. It would not necessarily have any negative implications for the existence of free will; those experiments are simply exploring the mechanism of free will.

On the other hand, I believe they do kind of imply that consciousness is a product of the jello in your noggin. Either that or there are some funky delays involved.

Now, as for the third buttock: if consciousness doesn’t come from the brain, how does it work, exactly? I'd like some mechanism with my philosophy, thanks. Presumably, if I'm waving my arms around, you can trace the motor neuron activity from my appendages, up my spinal cord, and into my brain. But "and then a miracle occurs" is a pretty uninteresting way to connect that with the universe deciding that jazz hands are necessary.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/

[2] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_d...

[3] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110831/full/477023a.html

[4] http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/09/03/free-choic...

Can this connection be distorted or interrupted? What are the effects of doing so?

If you accept that a drug-induced solipsistic, out-of-body effect[1] is an alteration of subjective experience, are you then going to argue that "While your memories, feelings, and subjective experience are in the body, your X may not be." What would X be?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6197315

It fundamentally comes from asking the question, "What am I if you strip away everything that is impermanent?" Emotions are impermanent, thoughts are impermanent, sensations are impermanent... but cognizance -- if you take that away, there is no longer anything. It is the most fundamental.

I didn't notice the earlier post on this, but I think all people should think deeply on this. It is not just sophomoric philosophy, it's deeply practical, and few people bashing it understand it. That lack of understanding leads incredibly often to, well, suffering.

Acknowledging the nature of existence intellectually isn't enough, you need to experience it. I see this very often in people of any age. Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of love, fear of change. But at the root, no matter what happens if you are comfortable with the nature of your own existence, you know that no one can take that cognizance away. Buddhists monks manage to light themselves calmly on fire in the interest of helping others.

Anyway. I obviously have many thoughts on this. It's something I've been thinking about and meditating on a great deal for over a decade. I will just end with a famous quote by Pascal.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

EDIT: I also hate it when philosophers abuse physics. I'm a physicist, so every time I hear "quantum mechanics" in a philosophical context I put down the book to avoid throwing it. As a friend put it, as soon as Buddhist monks can derive the ground state of the hydrogen atom, I'll give them credit for understanding quantum mechanics. I think that people who suggest that Buddhism is related to these sorts of things know neither physics nor Buddhism.