We don't know if consciousness is physical, Period.

[AgnosticBoy]

On another thread, one member stated the following regarding consciousness:

Where you are begging the question is when you assume that the mind (i e. Something immaterial) is responsible for that, when the brain (network of neurons plugged to stimulus from the outside world + a bunch of accidents of evolution) can perfectly be pointed as the source of those behavior.

Before assuming something immaterial is responsible for a phenomenon, starts by proving something immaterial exist to begin with.

Not only am I skeptical of this claim, which is a common claim made by atheists, but I also get annoyed by the level of confidence that people have in the above claim. If the researchers that study consciousness acknowledge that it presents a 'hard problem', then why should I believe any claims that explain consciousness as being physical? In my view, there are good reasons to doubt that consciousness is material or physical. The way I look at it is that even if consciousness is physical, it is still unlike any other physical phenomenon in the Universe. The main reason for that is that the presence of subjectivity. As it stands, subjective experiences can only be observed by the subject. Also, they are not measurable nor observable from the third-person point-of-view. Don't all of those characteristics sound familiar to some thing else? Immaterial or non-physical (also being unobservable, not measurable, etc.)?

Please debate:
1. Is it arrogant to claim that consciousness is physical?
2. Are there good reasons to doubt that it is physical? Or do you agree with the point from the post I quoted at the beginning of this post?

[AgnosticBoy]

We do know that subjective experiences are not observable nor measurable.

No we don't !
Wow do not know how to measure them =/= it's impossible to measure them.
Argument from ignorance, like I said.

I did not claim that we don't know, but rather I made a stronger claim that subjective experience is not observable via the third-person pov. If you say that we can't measure it "yet", then you may as well claim that art can not be objectively assessed, yet. Why not also say that the non-physical can't be observed and measured "yet".

[AgnosticBoy]

How are consciousness and other mental phenomena not simply the result of brain activity? What could cause consciousness if not a working brain? The ability to think, learn, have memory, interpret electrical and chemical signals for our five senses, etc. are all the result of brain activity. The ability to be aware of our existence and surroundings, and to have subjective experiences and memories, are enabled by the brain.

You are making a lot of these claim as if conscious experience intuitively follows from neural activity. Just think of it like this: if we weren't able to report our conscious experience to others, do you think scientists would discover consciousness or deduce its existence from neural activity? Let me add a few hints to help people answer that, such as, consciousness being private, not measurable, nor observable by others. I think the answer is obviously no. The ONLY way a scientist in that scenario would know about consciousness is if they went by their own experience or if someone reported it to them. It's no surprise scientists today study consciousness by associating our reports of our experience with neural activity.

Nothing about neural activity tells us about consciousness. We should not forget that.

What I fail to see is why couldn't all that you're describing work if the brain was just a medium for consciousness.

What does that mean? How would consciousness "get into" the brain and occupy it? If consciousness were some external "thing" that somehow occupied our brains, then why would we not all have the same behavior, the same opinions and experiences, likes and dislikes, etc. once it occupied our brains? It is malleable and just a starting point for a newborn animal to use somehow? I don't see how this scheme is any different from the newborn having some base level of awareness and brain ability enabled purely by physical brain function, that expands as it learns and experiences things over time.

You are expecting me to offer a full theory of consciousness, but that's not needed at all to see the point. All that my point means is that we may one day be able to have conscious machines, conscious AI, which are things that engineers are already considering. This would show that there is more than one way to bring about consciousness, just as machines can navigate the environment in an entirely different way that humans do (e.g. self-driving cars come to mind).

In my view, saying that brain causes consciousness is a needlessly restrictive view.

Why? All observations point to that being the most likely explanation. If consciousness were something separate from an emergent property of a working brain, what is its origin? How does it come to occupy a brain as a medium? If it were something physical, does it have mass? Is it pure energy of some sort? How would anyone study it as a separate entity?

The point of me bringing up near-death experiences, comatose patients, and my point about measurement in an earlier post, explains why we must be open to consciousness not being limited to a working brain. All of these points create a reasonable doubt for the view that a brain is needed for consciousness.

What I see in the science of consciousness is that scientists don't have an explanation or a proven/coherent theory for it. Their knowledge of it essentially boils down to associations, as in, saying this occurs when that occurs. No real understanding of how and why.

What is the alternative? This is true of any open science problem ... offer up the best explanation based on observations and experiments, and continue to refine as more information becomes available. It seems there is a lot more observational evidence that consciousness is an emergent property of a working brain than that it is something else ... whatever that something else is. Has anyone offered up a description for consciousness that does not involve it being an emergent property of a brain, and that also doesn't boil down to associations, guesses, etc.? How far are the "non emergent" scientists in explaining consciousness compared to those in the emergent property category?

What harm is there to science when you have a more open conclusion (e.g. the brain being a medium as opposed to the sole source for consciousness)? The overall point is that the relation between consciousness and brain can be interpreted more than one way. You can say that brain causes consciousness, but the evidence is also consistent with the brain just being a medium for it.

[Bubuche87]

[Replying to AgnosticBoy in post #11]

I did not claim that we don't know, but rather I made a stronger claim that subjective experience is not observable via the third-person pov

Ok, it's a claim. What kind of novel (etc) predictions have you to support that claim?

You make a claim, you have the burden of proof.

For the rest of the message: yes ?
Which part of those sentences is false?
.
Are you adding the little brother of the argument from ignorance, aka the argument from incredulity ?

[DrNoGods]

[Replying to AgnosticBoy in post #12]

You are expecting me to offer a full theory of consciousness, but that's not needed at all to see the point. All that my point means is that we may one day be able to have conscious machines, conscious AI, which are things that engineers are already considering. This would show that there is more than one way to bring about consciousness, just as machines can navigate the environment in an entirely different way that humans do (e.g. self-driving cars come to mind).

What is your definition of consciousness? If we build machines based on AI that are the result of humans writing software that can run on the machine and make it appear to have the ability to reason or "think", would it be aware of itself in any way beyond what was programmed by the human (or code written by itself or another machine that was ultimatly created by a human)? Efforts to produce a "conscious" machine have been going on for decades, and using different approaches, eg. neural networks to try and simulate how the brain works, machine "learning" by training on huge datasets which is very popular now (eg. beating humans at Go and other games, ChatGPT and similar systems). These systems that "learn" by analyzing zillions of examples and extracting the most beneficial methods are not really learning but are doing a database analysis with optimizations based on specific goals selected by the programmers (eg. for Go ... the most probable approaches to winning a game given its current condition during play)

If humans do succeed in making a machine that can achieve rudimentary learning by simulating how a brain works (rather than the training approach which clearly isn't consciousness or anything close ... it is enabled now by ever more capable computers, memory, and the world wide web of millions or billions of computers that now store nearly all of the knowledge accumulate by humans and can be searched relatively easy to find it), that would seem to me to just be more evidence that the brain is capable of producing consciousness. The human-made machine that can "think" is just running software that was written by a human or another machine, and it would have been designed to perform some kind of logical approach to problem solving that simulates the human thought and learning processes.

But this is more about intelligence than consciousness. A worm is conscious in that it is aware of its surroundings ... "awake." We could much more easily create a machine that simulated the abilities of a worm brain than a human brain, but neither is more "conscious" than the other using the definition of consciousness as being aware, awake, etc. Do you have a different definition of consciousness?

The point of me bringing up near-death experiences, comatose patients, and my point about measurement in an earlier post, explains why we must be open to consciousness not being limited to a working brain. All of these points create a reasonable doubt for the view that a brain is needed for consciousness.

What evidence is there that NDEs and the like are not simply the result of a compromised brain? I'm a vivid dreamer and always have been, and often can fly and do all kinds of unrealistic things as my brain pieces together experiences, memories, etc. in semi-random ways during this semi-conscious state. If someone is near death or has a compromised brain in some way, I'd expect the brain to do similar things and the person could have experiences similar to deep sleep and dreams. Has anyone shown this to not be the case?

What harm is there to science when you have a more open conclusion (e.g. the brain being a medium as opposed to the sole source for consciousness)? The overall point is that the relation between consciousness and brain can be interpreted more than one way. You can say that brain causes consciousness, but the evidence is also consistent with the brain just being a medium for it.

No harm in having an open mind, but we see strong correlations between living things that have a brain, and consciousness. The most obvious hypothesis for what causes consciousness is that it is an emergent property of a working brain. We know brains exist, we observe that consciousness appears only to exist in something with a brain, and vanish when that brain ceases to work. We know the brain is capable of abstract thought, emotions, processing chemical and electrical signals to provide sensory inputs and reactions, etc., and it has a tremendous capability to learn. What's so special about consciousness? If the brain is a medium for consciousness, you're left with having to explain how consciousness got there, where it came from, what it is if it is a physical thing, etc. That is a lot more complicated and (I think) far short on evidence compared to the simple explanation that consciousness is an emergent property of a brain.

[boatsnguitars]

Not only do I believe that conscious experience has not been reduced to physical properties, but I also think the characteristics of conscious experience speak for itself. In other words, it appears nonphysical just based on description - based on what it is or involves (as opposed to explanation, how or why it is that way). Earlier in your post you mentioned that atheists go by scientific evidence to back up their claims, but on this topic, I find that many tend to get ahead of science by presuming that the conventional materialistic explanation will be proven right; "it's just a matter of time" so they say.

For all I know, better measurement will also enable scientists to detect consciousness without the brain. I think we're getting closer to that, since we're getting better at bringing people back from impending death, and people are able to recount their experiences during that time (i.e. NDEs). Also, we're getting better at detecting consciousness in those with impaired brain function. So perhaps our inability to measure consciousness when there's little to no brain function is just a matter of limitations on our technology and know-how, that we will eventually overcome. It's just a matter of time!

It is understandable that you believe that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical properties based on your own personal experience and observations. However, the scientific community has not yet found convincing evidence to support the existence of non-physical consciousness. It is true that science is always advancing, and it is possible that future discoveries may challenge the current understanding of consciousness, but until such evidence is presented, it is reasonable to base our understanding on the evidence currently available.

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are certainly an intriguing phenomenon - but not for why you think. However, they are not necessarily evidence for non-physical consciousness. The fact that people can recall experiences during a period of impaired brain function does not necessarily mean that consciousness exists independently of the brain. It is possible that these experiences are the result of brain activity that occurs during this period, or they may be a result of psychological factors such as expectation or memory retrieval.

In terms of detecting consciousness without the brain, it is important to keep in mind that consciousness is an emergent property of complex biological systems. While it is theoretically possible for consciousness to exist in some non-biological form, it is not yet clear how this could be detected or measured. While future advances in technology may provide new insights into consciousness, it is important to base our understanding on the best available evidence and avoid making assumptions that are not supported by the evidence.

One of the problems is that you are trying to 'put a name' to an emergent property that might not be reasonable. Consciousness definitely seems tied to the physical brain, and the electrical activity within it. Just like a computer, we can't see - by looking at the microchip and hard drive - the Herbie The Love Bug movie we saved. It exists like a memory in our brain, but it's not a specific thing to witness.
The way we watch the movie in a computer is by using the hardware and software to view it.
Just like our brains, we access the hardware and software to access emotions, etc.
Our brains, eyes, ears, skin, and nervous system are our monitor, keyboard, speakers and hard drive.

Moreover, recent research has shown that certain patterns of neural activity in the brain can predict conscious experience with remarkable accuracy. For example, a study by Kamitani and Tong (2005) showed that it was possible to predict with 75% accuracy which of two images a person was looking at based solely on their patterns of brain activity. This suggests that conscious experience can be directly linked to specific patterns of neural activity in the brain.

Let me know when they are able to observe such experiences directly, instead of relying on a data pool of associations to infer from.

OK. A study by Seymour et al. (2017) which used fMRI to observe pain in real-time. Proves the idea that conscious experiences can be linked to specific patterns of neural activity in the brain.

Also:
1. Crick and Koch (1990) proposed the idea of a "neural correlate of consciousness," which suggests that specific patterns of neural activity in the brain are responsible for generating conscious experience.
2. A study by Hohwy et al. (2008) used fMRI to investigate the neural basis of visual awareness. They found that activity in the visual cortex was necessary for conscious experience, and that activity in other brain regions was not sufficient to generate conscious experience.
3. In a study by Dehaene et al. (2001), participants were presented with a series of masked stimuli that were either visible or invisible. The researchers found that activity in the visual cortex was correlated with conscious awareness of the stimuli, and that this activity was absent when the stimuli were not consciously perceived.
4. Another study by Tononi and Koch (2015) proposed a theoretical framework called Integrated Information Theory, which suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of information across distributed neural networks in the brain.
5. Baars, B. J. (2005). Global workspace theory of consciousness: toward a cognitive neuroscience of human experience. Progress in brain research, 150, 45-53.
6. Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Behavioral and brain sciences, 18(2), 227-287.
7. Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
8. Edelman, G. M. (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire: On the matter of the mind. New York: BasicBooks.
9. Lamme, V. A. (2003). Why visual attention and awareness are different. Trends in cognitive sciences, 7(1), 12-18.
10. Libet, B. (1999). Do we have free will?. Journal of consciousness studies, 6(8-9), 47-57.
11. Rosenthal, D. (1991). The independence of consciousness and sensory quality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 14(4), 703-724.
12. Searle, J. R. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
13. Tononi, G., & Edelman, G. M. (1998). Consciousness and complexity. Science, 282(5395), 1846-1851.

BTW, the Crick & Koch study is interesting:
The study by Crick and Koch, titled "Toward a neurobiological theory of consciousness," was published in the journal Seminars in Neuroscience in 1990. The study proposed a theory of consciousness that is rooted in neuroscience and suggests that conscious experience can be explained by the activity of neurons in the brain.

The authors argue that the brain operates through the coordinated firing of neurons and that consciousness emerges from this neural activity. They suggest that the thalamus, a structure in the brain that relays sensory information to other parts of the brain, plays a critical role in the generation of consciousness.

The study proposes that consciousness is created through the synchronized firing of neurons in the thalamus and that this activity is then broadcast to other parts of the brain. The authors suggest that this process is responsible for the integration of sensory information, which creates the experience of a unified self.

The thalamus is a structure in the brain that plays a crucial role in processing and relaying sensory information to the cortex, which is involved in higher-order processing and consciousness. One theory suggests that the thalamus is also responsible for generating a sense of self by integrating sensory information and regulating the activity of other brain regions.

According to this theory, the thalamus acts as a kind of filter, selectively allowing certain sensory information to pass through to the cortex while suppressing or filtering out other information. This filtering process creates a kind of internal representation of the external world that is personalized to the individual. In other words, the thalamus helps to create a sense of self by creating a unique and subjective representation of the external world that is based on an individual's past experiences, memories, and perceptions.

Additionally, the thalamus is thought to be involved in coordinating different brain regions and integrating information from multiple sensory modalities. This integration process allows for a unified perception of the world and a sense of continuity over time, which are also important components of a sense of self.

Overall, the thalamus is thought to play a critical role in the creation and maintenance of a sense of self (i.e., Consciousness) by integrating and regulating sensory information, coordinating different brain regions, and creating a personalized representation of the external world.

And, after all, if materialism is true, wouldn't you expect that consciousness can be expalined this parsimoniously? Despite how we feel about it being a "Hard Problem", under Materialism, we'd expect it to be anwered fairly easily - once this Great Ape of a species can think a little better about the topic. We are, after all, still animals.

Satisfied, or are the goalposts about to get moved?

[boatsnguitars]

[Replying to AgnosticBoy in post #12]

You are expecting me to offer a full theory of consciousness, but that's not needed at all to see the point. All that my point means is that we may one day be able to have conscious machines, conscious AI, which are things that engineers are already considering. This would show that there is more than one way to bring about consciousness, just as machines can navigate the environment in an entirely different way that humans do (e.g. self-driving cars come to mind).

What is your definition of consciousness? If we build machines based on AI that are the result of humans writing software that can run on the machine and make it appear to have the ability to reason or "think", would it be aware of itself in any way beyond what was programmed by the human (or code written by itself or another machine that was ultimatly created by a human)? Efforts to produce a "conscious" machine have been going on for decades, and using different approaches, eg. neural networks to try and simulate how the brain works, machine "learning" by training on huge datasets which is very popular now (eg. beating humans at Go and other games, ChatGPT and similar systems). These systems that "learn" by analyzing zillions of examples and extracting the most beneficial methods are not really learning but are doing a database analysis with optimizations based on specific goals selected by the programmers (eg. for Go ... the most probable approaches to winning a game given its current condition during play)

If humans do succeed in making a machine that can achieve rudimentary learning by simulating how a brain works (rather than the training approach which clearly isn't consciousness or anything close ... it is enabled now by ever more capable computers, memory, and the world wide web of millions or billions of computers that now store nearly all of the knowledge accumulate by humans and can be searched relatively easy to find it), that would seem to me to just be more evidence that the brain is capable of producing consciousness. The human-made machine that can "think" is just running software that was written by a human or another machine, and it would have been designed to perform some kind of logical approach to problem solving that simulates the human thought and learning processes.

But this is more about intelligence than consciousness. A worm is conscious in that it is aware of its surroundings ... "awake." We could much more easily create a machine that simulated the abilities of a worm brain than a human brain, but neither is more "conscious" than the other using the definition of consciousness as being aware, awake, etc. Do you have a different definition of consciousness?

The point of me bringing up near-death experiences, comatose patients, and my point about measurement in an earlier post, explains why we must be open to consciousness not being limited to a working brain. All of these points create a reasonable doubt for the view that a brain is needed for consciousness.

What evidence is there that NDEs and the like are not simply the result of a compromised brain? I'm a vivid dreamer and always have been, and often can fly and do all kinds of unrealistic things as my brain pieces together experiences, memories, etc. in semi-random ways during this semi-conscious state. If someone is near death or has a compromised brain in some way, I'd expect the brain to do similar things and the person could have experiences similar to deep sleep and dreams. Has anyone shown this to not be the case?

What harm is there to science when you have a more open conclusion (e.g. the brain being a medium as opposed to the sole source for consciousness)? The overall point is that the relation between consciousness and brain can be interpreted more than one way. You can say that brain causes consciousness, but the evidence is also consistent with the brain just being a medium for it.

No harm in having an open mind, but we see strong correlations between living things that have a brain, and consciousness. The most obvious hypothesis for what causes consciousness is that it is an emergent property of a working brain. We know brains exist, we observe that consciousness appears only to exist in something with a brain, and vanish when that brain ceases to work. We know the brain is capable of abstract thought, emotions, processing chemical and electrical signals to provide sensory inputs and reactions, etc., and it has a tremendous capability to learn. What's so special about consciousness? If the brain is a medium for consciousness, you're left with having to explain how consciousness got there, where it came from, what it is if it is a physical thing, etc. That is a lot more complicated and (I think) far short on evidence compared to the simple explanation that consciousness is an emergent property of a brain.

I often wonder if Dualists are doing this - bear with me....

I was sitting on the NYC subway. I saw a woman, a man, a seat, a hand hold, a poster, etc. Each of those things have names. They are made up of trillions of atoms, which we can name, and they all have complex physical makeups that we could name. (Diameter of the pipe, weight of the man, length of the woman's ring finger, etc.
Who the woman was, as a person, or the man, and his thoughts, and the history of the metal in the pipe, were all part of the scene.
But, also, the relationship of the woman to the man, to the seat, to the pole, to the train, to the city, etc, was all part of the scene, and when the man moved his arm, the scene changes, the relationship changed.

I could name that scene "thrack"- by witnessing that unique combination of things. It was a unique experience, and one that would never be repeated for millions of years, if at all (that exact collection of things, in those poses, with those backgrounds, thoughts, properties.) If it changed, I could name it "grack". On and on.

We name things for efficiency, and usually as a way to talk about components. We name a person, they make up crowds, but we don't name the specific organization of a crowd (if people mill about, it's still a crowd).

I think Dualists are trying to do this with consciousness. They know there are parts involved in the "scene" or "crowd" (The thalamus, the nervous system, brain, axons, neurons, etc.), but they keep referring to the overall experience of the scene: of the "thrack" or the "grack", or the crowd of individual elements of what they are experiencing. They are trying to name something that simply is pointless to name.

"What's it like to be a bat?"

Well, it's like a "khwaft". It's the "scene" of being made up of specific bat body parts, bat history, bat brain, etc. It's reduceable to individual parts, but when you look at the collection of parts - like I saw on the Subway - it's not as specific anymore. Sure, it creates another "scene" - it's emergent - but it's not an important question because, as we can see, naming a collection of inter-related things is always available to us - it's just not informative (I was going to say, "Meaningful", but clearly that day on the Subway was meaningful to me). That day on the Subway, or any other "scene" is just "there". We, as species, filter out much of the data into a specific group of electro-magnetic spectrum, atomic weights, etc. and move about the world that is, in reality, a vast collection of atoms. Our perspective is only what the Ape species allows us to see and experience, and everything else would seem mysterious.

In short, Dualists seem to want to deny that things (thoughts and feelings, etc.) can emerge from more basic organizations of things (atoms, etc.). The Materialist not only sees this as true, there is a vast collection of evidence that smaller things make up more compliated things. Consciousness wouldn't be exempt.

[JoeyKnothead]

1. Is it arrogant to claim that consciousness is physical?

No more'n to claim your favored god is the one that caused it.

2. Are there good reasons to doubt that it is physical?

None I'm aware of.

Or do you agree with the point from the post I quoted at the beginning of this post?

Evolutionary theory does a fine job here. Where increasing sensory and mental abilities are a thing, eventually consciousness is apt to occur.

Contrast that with "goddidit".

[AgnosticBoy]

I appreciate the good debate here and all of the views posted, esp. from DrNoGods and boatnguitars.

Just to update the you guys...
I'm going to take some time off from this particular debate so I can reexamine my views, discard or solidify them, if need be. I find it easier to do that while not engaged in the debate, so please don't think I'm just running away

[JoeyKnothead]

I appreciate the good debate here and all of the views posted, esp. from DrNoGods and boatnguitars.

Just to update the you guys...
I'm going to take some time off from this particular debate so I can reexamine my views, discard or solidify them, if need be. I find it easier to do that while not engaged in the debate, so please don't think I'm just running away

We can't rightly fault anyone for needing time to fish through their thoughts. You did you a good bit of fussing too.

[spasausinh]

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