The unending quest to explain consciousness
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The unending quest to explain consciousness
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Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#2The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that.
Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people.
Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was co-extensive with but not the same as the physical body.
This is basic, run=of-the-mill, kiddie-level metaphysics. The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness begins with the exclusion of all the relevant information.
( If you really want to know what consciousness is, there is a wide, short road: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramana_Maharshi#Self-enquiry )
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#3If the Human Brain Were So Simple That We Could Understand It, We Would Be So Simple That We Couldn’t
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#4The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that. Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people. Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was…
> you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people
How do you learn that? If I'm being honest this sounds a bit too far fetched even for someone like myself who's experienced a fair share of strange phenomena that don't fit in the usual narratives.
The Wikipedia link you posted sounds a lot like Raja Yoga. Are they related in any way?
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#5The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#6The locus of sensory perception is not in the brain, out-of-body experiences indicate that. Thoughts are a kind of stuff different from the stuff that bodies are made of. They kind of hover around your head, and with practice, you can learn to see the thoughts around the heads of other people. Emotion is again a third kind of stuff. Gurdjieff identified emotion with the "blood" of a kind of emotional "body" that was…
Out-of-body experiences have failed to provide the person experiencing them with information that they couldn't have obtained while being in their body. That indicates that they're not in fact extrasensory experiences, but something that happens inside the brain.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#7The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
I think this is a good question. Though we have some tools.
Did you ever faint? I did, definitely wasn’t conscious. Or whenever they dozed me under in thr hospital, not conscious.
In parts of my sleep, I’m not conscious. I now know this because recently my tinnitus became worse and I now here it in my dreams, based on the sound and frequency, I can infer time because of it (my tinnitus, although annoying has a regular multiphonic modulated sine wave quality to it, I could recreate it on a synthesizer, it’s quite beautiful but not 24/7). Also since it is a new development I get really conscious when I hear my tinnitus while I dream. I am conscious for 10 minutes per night.
This has only lasted 3 nights so far, so not much data.
Whenever my dreams do not have tinnitus, I am less conscious. I also notice this in dreams by my tinnitus ebbing away and me losing consciousness. There’s a similar process of losing some consciousness when I become too stoned.
Based on my experience, memory is a crucial part for my conscious experience.
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#8The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
There are theories that equate information processing (integration/differentiation) with consciousness.
It maps well with what happens in your brain, where too little or too much functional connectivity maps to loss of consciousness (think anesthesia and epilepsy).
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#9The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
I think this is a good question. Though we have some tools. Did you ever faint? I did, definitely wasn’t conscious. Or whenever they dozed me under in thr hospital, not conscious. In parts of my sleep, I’m not conscious. I now know this because recently my tinnitus became worse and I now here it in my dreams, based on the sound and frequency, I can infer time because of it (my tinnitus, although annoying has a regula…
'We ‘may’ have discovered a potential remedy for tinnitus – by accident.' - https://www.linkedin.com/content-guest/article/we-may-have-d...
Re: The unending quest to explain consciousness
#10The really hard problem of consciousness is giving a definition that allows me to tell whether a rock is more or less conscious than a person.
Not sure its hard to come up with a definition that does that. eg consciousness is awareness of stuff as in the internal state changing in a way that corresponds. So when humans see stuff you get neurons firing, with the rock less so. A problem is everyone has different definitions though.