Could consciousness be an illusion?

[idav]

I can put it just the other way. Consciousness pervades all nook and corners and thus all is known. Discrete materials cannot do that. Because consciousness is, materials are. Has anyone had any experience of unconsciousness and then of materials?

I had experience recently with a paranormal activity but it was a physical presence.

 

[Penumbra]

I think you and other physicalists assume that the causal relationship exists here.

It's not X--> Z, it's more like X --> Y -->

Do you see the difference? X and Y are TOTALLY different from the experience of red.

Here's a picture of Starcraft 2:

Here's a rough picture of an atom:

You can take a bunch of atoms, and make Starcraft 2. But, there are so many layers of abstraction, that if you had no idea how this worked, you might be tempted to claim that you simply can't take a bunch of fuzzy spheres and end up playing a war strategy game.

But how it works is, you take atoms to form compounds, then you take some compounds to form a transistor, and then you take several transistors and form a logic gate. That's a big level of abstraction right there, because you're getting a consistent mathematical operation that can be expressed with symbols and numbers, from these fuzzy spheres that themselves do not perform anything like a logical operation. Then you take logic gates, and you run electricity through them, and you get another level of abstraction which is code. The code, along with I/O systems and so forth, constitute the game.

I think that what you're doing, is looking at a very high level of abstraction (qualia), and we do not know how neurons can cause it, and you're saying that there's just no way something can come from something so different from itself. Like, how do neurons turn into subjective experience?

But, how does a fuzzy sphere turn into a highly complex mathematical formula? If you exclude all of the middle steps it sounds impossible, but we know those middle steps. That's why I think it's highly premature to say that consciousness can't be an emergent property of matter, simply because middle steps are unknown.

Yes a decrease in dopamine does cause clinical depression but so can a depressing thought, like the death of a loved one. It is not dopamine or whichever neurotransmitter which causes these changes but it is thought itself which is the primary source of all conscious experience. It is the base of consciousness. And if we were to reduce that further, it is the meaning we assign to thought which guides how we feel. Perhaps intentionality is more powerful than qualia. Neurotransmitters after all work on the synaptic connections in the brain which lead to thoughts. Dopamine doesn't cause pleasure, it works on the post synaptic receptors which result in electrical spikes which cause pleasure. And then there are the neurotransmitters which allow us to learn and understand such as acteylcholine. How do you explain why we assign meanings to things through these neurotransmitters? Or why we understand? From a neuroscientific perspective it's impossible.

And yet even with such strong correlates, we have absolutely no way to understand how the physical substrates give rise to the conscious experience.

You take dopamine, give it to someone, and they feel pleasure. Casual means that an effect comes from a cause. It doesn't mean that this precise step, directly causes something else. For example, if you murder someone, you go to jail. But really, police arrest you, there's a trial, and then you go to jail. Murder and jail are not simply correlated; it's that murder leads to jail. Murder is the more fundamental step, the cause of being in jail.

The phrase to describe that is a casual relationship rather than just a correlative one. If dopamine and pleasure were always together, and that's all that we knew, then all we could say is that it's correlated but we don't know what direction it's causal in. Does pleasure cause dopamine to form, or does dopamine cause the brain to experience pleasure, or does some third thing cause both to form? What leads to what? The answer is that dopamine causes pleasure, because they can take it and give it to you, and you feel pleasure. Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer, and Sam Harris had a debate about that and Chopra's argument about consciousness being the first-mover was shut down by Shermer and Harris when they pointed out the very well known direction of causality.

There will never be a scientific explanation for consciousness because it escapes logic and mathematics, it is non scientific. It is subjective and personal and purely qualitative.

I'm not an expert on video games or AI, but from what I understand the bits on a chip give rise to different wavelengths of light being released from the computer screen. These wavelengths of light are interpreted by US into the character shooting the virtual gun. There is no virtual world...we create the virtual world with our own sense of perception from the patterns of light being released by the monitor. And the actions the shooter takes as an AI are algorithmic and predictable.

You've described mostly the physical output there, rather than the important core that mathematical computation, a very abstract concept, comes from objects that do not have any inherent ability to perform those highly complex mathematical functions.

 

[Penumbra]

There's IIT by Christof Koch and Guilio Tononi which is basically either neutral monism or idealism. There's Orch OR by Hameroff and Penrose, which is again neutral monism. There are a bunch of other quantum mind theories. I don't think i've ever really read any theories of mind which are purely physical, since they always leave out the ontological gap. In this situation the physicalist has to provide their own reasoning for the ontological gap aside from 'it just is'.

I've looked into Orch OR. I only took two courses in quantum physics so it's not something I can really go through, but it has been largely dismissed as speculative by mainstream mathematicians, physicists, biologists, etc. It doesn't actually describe a full working model as far as I know; just some novel speculative ideas.

Just because you find the certain parts of the brain which are correlated to the physical functions doesn't mean that qualia as a property is reducible. You have to think like a dualist to understand what I'm saying. There comes a point where qualia cannot be broken down any further because their very nature defies the idea of reductive thinking. Qualia are not purely logical, they are tied to the physical but as the conscious experience they exist as qualitative and subjective. They are irreducible.

Sentience is the ability to feel. As I have stated earlier there comes a point where you can't break it down any further, because there comes a point where feelings cannot be broken down.

I think you need to use a different word than irreducible then. Because I showed how it's reducible in several ways.

-In terms of amplitude, complexity, and missing parts (like frequency for hearing), qualia such as color or sound can be modified from extremely vivid down a spectrum to nothing.

-In terms of pure consciousness itself, it is a spectrum from completely comatose through various levels of increasing awareness, up to full awareness.

-In terms of brain/qualia causality, you can mildly damage something physical in the brain and reduce some aspect of qualia, or you can seriously damage something physical in the brain and utterly remove the ability to experience that type of qualia. So it can be stripped apart in a piecemeal fashion. It's not all or nothing.

What you seem to be saying by irreducibility is just restating that we don't know the middle steps of abstraction.

That is not causal evidence...you keep on asserting that it's causal evidence throughout this post. Causal evidence shows a clear mechanism between interactions and the outcome. All the neuroscience research in the world will never show any causal interaction between the brain and consciousness, simply strong correlations.

Strong correlation would mean that X and Y were always present, but we don't know in which direction.

But, if we try to use Y to bring about X and are unsuccessful, and use X to bring about Y and are successful, then we discovered the direction of causality.

You use anesthesia regularly instead of sleep, which is interesting since it is during sleep we actually have very strong conscious experiences. Anesthesia might simply be shutting off the part of the brain that receives the filter. We do remember the memories after we wake up but why do we ? What is memory? We still don't really know what memory is, we have located proteins in the brain which are involved in memory formation and regions of the brain that are responsible for memory but how do we store pieces of space and time in our brains and then recall them? Memories are a combination of some sort of physical storage, intentionality and qualia. Until we can explain the latter two noone can claim that the mystery of memory has been solved.

I specifically didn't use sleep for that reason. During parts of sleep, REM, you are conscious but not expressing that consciousness to the outside world. And that's why when you wake up, it doesn't feel like you literally fell asleep a half a second ago. It might not feel like a full 8 hours (because you were not conscious for the full 8 hours), but it does feel like some time passed (because you were conscious for some time).

Deepest levels of anesthesia are usually different. There are degrees of that too, but in the deepest degrees, you go to sleep and wake up a split second later wondering when they're going to start the surgery, and the nurse says you're done and it was a successful multi-hour operation. It's sheer oblivion, a total lack of subjective experience, as far as that mind can tell.

Anyways I don't really believe in the brain as a filter for consciousness theory. I think all matter has mind, and in different interactions give rise to different forms of consciousness.

So you think individual particles have consciousness?

Wouldn't that mean that mass matters more than organization for consciousness? But clearly the organization itself is what's really important.

Some of the cases are impossible to explain with modern neuroscience. The brain would not be able to create such vivid, highly lucid conscious states when severely deprived of oxygen. If consciousness is the product of some powerful complex interactions the brain magically creates it would be counterintuitive for our brains to have evolved elaborate fantasies in its last dying moments rather than saving whatever energy it has to survive just a little bit longer.

Firstly, there have been studies on dying rats that show that their brain has a flurry of measurably heightened activity at death. So the idea that a oxygen-deprived brain shouldn't be able to create vivid experiences, doesn't seem necessarily correct. It's hard to do a study on brain activity during human death for practical reasons, but they've at least done it on rats and saw a flurry of physical, measurable activity.

Secondly, certain substances can basically reproduce all of the elements in an NDE.

Third, only a small minority of people experience NDEs. There have been studies on people with cardiac arrest that determined the statistics; I forget the exact number but something like 80% don't experience anything and the 20% do, and then out of those 20%, the vast majority of them just experience something vague like peace or brightness, so only a few percent experience something a bit more complex, and then a subset of them go all the way to tea with Jesus or meeting grandma or having a life review or something. And interestingly, people that do experience an NDE statistically become far more spiritual, and people that do not experience an NDE statistically become far less spiritual.

-Fourth, NDE's conflict with one another. Some come back and say there is no hell, while others come back and say they went to hell and it sucked. Some come back and say there is no reincarnation, and some come back and say that they got to learn about their previously reincarnated selves. Some meet Jesus, some meet an angel of Allah, some meet Hindu gods. There was a study once that studied NDE's across cultures; even fairly basic ideas like whether the person feels peace or not, or whether there's a tunnel, are actually pretty determined by country of origin.

-Fifth, NDE's don't take into account how each individual aspect of the experience can be taken away while still alive. For example, most people with an NDE come back saying that not only were they conscious, but they were still an individual with personality and memories and an ability to see and hear and have completely new senses too. So not only did their consciousness supposedly survive death, but all that other stuff did too. And yet, memories can be destroyed biologically while the person lives, personality can be altered biologically while the person lives, senses can be taken away while the person lives, and consciousness can biologically taken away while the person lives.

 

[atanu]

Because the memories in the brain are unharmed.

Ya. The brain is storage and coloring media. So, is there some mechanism or a person that reads the brain and finds that this person of now is the same person of 8 hour ago?

 

[idav]

Ya. The brain is storage and coloring media.

No no you have it all wrong, its multimedia. Think 3D man!

 

[atanu]

Everything is physical/material and there are many forms or manifestations of matter, but underlying all that matter are the formless and the ceaseless forces of nature...gravity, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear. There may be others which are fundamental that we don't know about, but these forces combined are what cause those interactions which give us consciousness or life and the reason why there is action and reaction, cause and effect to begin with. Ultimately though, even those forces are a physical part of this universe. Even a ghost or spirit, should they exist, would still be subject to a physical existence of some sort. We may simply not know or we may not be aware of what all different forms or manifestations that matter, or those forces, or that energy may take.

---

OK. Probably you are just predating birth of consciousness.

What you are saying is that along with all other objects consciousness is also an object that got born at some time due to interaction of the forces.

Among all these born things, consciousness seems to be special since it seems that it knows the co-born and it also knows the forces that gave birth to it.

Isn't it somewhat like a character of a novel becoming conscious and dissecting the novel's author? If consciousness is born deterministically due to interaction of the four fundamental forces then what chance the deterministically born consciousness has of objectively knowing the forces?

We need to ask:
1. From the 1st party perspective has anyone experienced any object while being unconscious?
2. From 3rd party perspective has anyone seen a dead body-brain conscious?

Despite the above two experiences, why we have the notion that consciousness that reveals thoughts/objects/self/universe is a product of these objects?

In spiritual parlance this is called the illusion or mAyA.

Will the 4 kind of forces be theorised without the consciousness?

 

[Runewolf1973]

OK. Probably you are just predating birth of consciousness.

What you are saying is that along with all other objects consciousness is also an object that got born at some time due to interaction of the forces.

Among all these born things, consciousness seems to be special since it seems that it knows the co-born and it also knows the forces that gave birth to it.

Isn't it somewhat like a character of a novel becoming conscious and dissecting the novel's author? If consciousness is born deterministically due to interaction of the four fundamental forces then what chance the deterministically born consciousness has of objectively knowing the forces?

We need to ask:
1. From the 1st party perspective has anyone experienced any object while being unconscious?
2. From 3rd party perspective has anyone seen a dead body-brain conscious?

Despite the above two experiences, why we have the notion that consciousness that reveals thoughts/objects/self/universe is a product of these objects?

In spiritual parlance this is called the illusion or mAyA.

Will the 4 kind of forces be theorised without the consciousness?

There are always going to be things we don't know or don't understand fully and that is a matter of fact.These are just details really, and do nothing so far as to undermine the underlying message. Do you think an animist with a rather primitive belief system really concerns themselves with such things? To put it quite simply, there are animating forces in nature that cause or affect everything we experience or know to exist.

 

[atanu]

... To put it quite simply, there are animating forces in nature that cause or affect everything we experience or know to exist.

I agree. The animating force and the consciousness are not really separate.

I note the following vedantic view of consciousness for the sake of record, knowing that some, especially the materialists, may have apparent justification for deriding it.

The notion that life originated at some point of time during evolution of this planet is a thought of mind, which per se is not the consciousness, which actually is the container for the mind (a bag of thoughts and concepts).

Like space has embedded stars/planets, consciousness is empty but hosts thoughts/objects. In our case, the thoughts are so pervasive that the underlying blank screen of infinite consciousness (prjanana) is not discerned. We take thoughts as the consciousness. The consciousness, OTOH, is infinite ocean wherein finite thoughts/objects arise and die.

Although we discern the blank-infinite every night, due to non functioning of mind and consequent lack of objects, the infinite blank is not known by the mind -- it seems an unconscious state to mind. The spiritual practices aim at seeing/knowing the blank, mindlessly-non sensually.
..........................

If consciousness was merely a born product of interaction of matter, then the process would be absolutely deterministic. In such a case, a deterministically born intelligence should not be anything other than a programmed robot. Which means that a deterministically born intelligence has no way of objectively arriving at truth value of any proposition.

...

 

[idav]

If consciousness was merely a born product of interaction of matter, then the process would be absolutely deterministic. In such a case, a deterministically born intelligence should not be anything other than a programmed robot. Which means that a deterministically born intelligence has no way of objectively arriving at truth value of any proposition.

...

I don't think that's true, when determinism becomes thousand to millions of inputs to make choices by, there will be objective truth found. Some species might come across chemicals and not be able to do anything but follow but that isn't humans, there isn't just one input sensory to choose from.

 

[Willamena]

I don't think that's true, when determinism becomes thousand to millions of inputs to make choices by, there will be objective truth found.

This may be off-topic, but determinism is nothing more than words, categories, ideas, put in order by thought. Put in order by us. It is so much noise--and increasing the amount of the noise doesn't make for truth, as fascinating an idea as it is. That "this follows that" is no less just the truth of words. There is truth in silence and words are useful only for communication.

...That there is a way of looking at life apart from all conceptions, beliefs, opinions, and theories is the remotest of all possibilities from the [perspective of the] modern mind. If such a point of view exists, it can only be in the vacant brain of a moron. We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos.

We must repeat: memory, thought, language, and logic are essential to human life. They are only half of sanity. But a person, a society, which is only half sane is insane. To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words--to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked in incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseum.

It's the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply rearrangements of old words and ideas.

Alan Watts, "The Wisdom of Insecurity"

 

[Runewolf1973]

This may be off-topic, but determinism is nothing more than words, categories, ideas, put in order by thought. Put in order by us. It is so much noise--and increasing the amount of the noise doesn't make for truth, as fascinating an idea as it is. That "this follows that" is no less just the truth of words. There is truth in silence and words are useful only for communication.

Thank you Willamena.

 

[atanu]

This may be off-topic, but determinism is nothing more than words, categories, ideas, put in order by thought. Put in order by us. It is so much noise--and increasing the amount of the noise doesn't make for truth, as fascinating an idea as it is. That "this follows that" is no less just the truth of words. There is truth in silence and words are useful only for communication.

Thank you. Allow me this. Similar is the distinction between so called material-non material or physical-non physical.

We have always been asked to ponder as how a thought connects to a physical thing and activates an action. We are told that the so called material object and the thought object are of same nature. Just as water may be in three states, consciousness, which in itself is ungraspable, manifests in three states of sleep, dream, and waking. And the Word creates all apparent boundaries.

 

[Willamena]

Thank you. Allow me this. Similar is the distinction between so called material-non material or physical-non physical.

We have always been asked to ponder as how a thought connects to a physical thing and activates an action. We are told that the so called material object and the thought object are of same nature. Just as water may be in three states, consciousness, which in itself is ungraspable, manifests in three states of sleep, dream, and waking. And the Word creates all apparent boundaries.

Yes. The thought gets a name, a word, in awareness, and automatically a host of other things attach in relation to it. Stop naming things and a connection (relation) is no longer necessary between the thought and the thing, for they are seen to be the same.

 

[MD]

Here's a picture of Starcraft 2:

Here's a rough picture of an atom:

You can take a bunch of atoms, and make Starcraft 2. But, there are so many layers of abstraction, that if you had no idea how this worked, you might be tempted to claim that you simply can't take a bunch of fuzzy spheres and end up playing a war strategy game.

But how it works is, you take atoms to form compounds, then you take some compounds to form a transistor, and then you take several transistors and form a logic gate.

I'm not a physics or engineering major but aren't you're leaving out energy? The atoms make up the chips, but the elctrons and photons which give rise to the video game are much more important here than the atom itself. And the very nature of electrons and photons is unknown, because they exist as dualities of waves and particles. Do we know actually what waves are? Or what matter is? At the most fundamental philosophical level the answer is no, we don't. The main argument that a physicalist and a dualist will have is not whether the mind is separate from the brain, but whether the mind is another property of the universe or whether it all just magically pops into existence.

That's a big level of abstraction right there, because you're getting a consistent mathematical operation that can be expressed with symbols and numbers, from these fuzzy spheres that themselves do not perform anything like a logical operation. Then you take logic gates, and you run electricity through them, and you get another level of abstraction which is code. The code, along with I/O systems and so forth, constitute the game.

The symbols and numbers are objects created by our very own minds which gave rise to the equations of abstract math. It's how we understand the universe, through our own conscious thinking. Codes are also not really abstract, they follow set algorithmic patterns. Although the algorithmic patterns may be highly complex, they are reducible and traceable.

I think that what you're doing, is looking at a very high level of abstraction (qualia), and we do not know how neurons can cause it, and you're saying that there's just no way something can come from something so different from itself. Like, how do neurons turn into subjective experience?

But, how does a fuzzy sphere turn into a highly complex mathematical formula? If you exclude all of the middle steps it sounds impossible, but we know those middle steps. That's why I think it's highly premature to say that consciousness can't be an emergent property of matter, simply because middle steps are unknown.

The middle steps include more than the atom. They include invisible magnetic fields, energy, electrical charge. All of these are fundamental properties of the universe that are more than what the fuzzy field of the atom shows us. They are new properties of the universe necessary to build the circuit and the code within it. When the concept of magnetic fields first came about it was ridiculed.

The mental/experiential is the next new field that must exist to a dualist. To deny it's existence is in my opinion to be the same as those who ridiculed the magnetic field a few hundred years ago.

You take dopamine, give it to someone, and they feel pleasure. Casual means that an effect comes from a cause. It doesn't mean that this precise step, directly causes something else. For example, if you murder someone, you go to jail. But really, police arrest you, there's a trial, and then you go to jail. Murder and jail are not simply correlated; it's that murder leads to jail. Murder is the more fundamental step, the cause of being in jail.

I guess it depends on what you mean by cause then. I believe a causal effect is something that acts as a cause towards creating something else. Saying dopamine is the cause of pleasure is kind of like saying gasoline is the cause of an automobile's motion. There is the whole mechanism involved with pistons and ignition and of course the act of the driver pressing on the accelerator. Dopamine is part of the cause towards pleasure, but there is a whole lot more than dopamine going on.

The phrase to describe that is a casual relationship rather than just a correlative one. If dopamine and pleasure were always together, and that's all that we knew, then all we could say is that it's correlated but we don't know what direction it's causal in. Does pleasure cause dopamine to form, or does dopamine cause the brain to experience pleasure, or does some third thing cause both to form? What leads to what? The answer is that dopamine causes pleasure, because they can take it and give it to you, and you feel pleasure. Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer, and Sam Harris had a debate about that and Chopra's argument about consciousness being the first-mover was shut down by Shermer and Harris when they pointed out the very well known direction of causality.

It's funny how you mention Sam Harris when I posted an article in this thread earlier by him stating that there will never be a physical explanation for consciousness. You can have the same levels of dopamine in the brain and still be a much happier person based on your thoughts. Dopamine works on post synaptic receptors which works on the post synaptic receptors which results in different action potentials being generated to create the feelings of pleasure and happiness. Even if you take the electromagnetic properties of the neuron and the action of dopamine, it still cannot fully account for why we feel pleasure, a concept that does not exist in physical reality.

You've described mostly the physical output there, rather than the important core that mathematical computation, a very abstract concept, comes from objects that do not have any inherent ability to perform those highly complex mathematical functions.

Mathematical computations and equations are things created by our own minds to map out the nature of computation. We embed these computational models into chips and code, we place them into objects which perform them.

 

[MD]

I've looked into Orch OR. I only took two courses in quantum physics so it's not something I can really go through, but it has been largely dismissed as speculative by mainstream mathematicians, physicists, biologists, etc. It doesn't actually describe a full working model as far as I know; just some novel speculative ideas.

Not really, the objections raised by Tegmark were reversed by all the findings in quantum biology over the last several years. There was even a recent article about quantum vibrations found in microtubules.

I think you need to use a different word than irreducible then. Because I showed how it's reducible in several ways.

I don't mean reducible in the sense that you can change the amplitude of the perception. By irreducible I mean that it cannot be broken down into anything more simple. For example, color can't be broken down into particles of color. Color just exists on its own. A table can be broken down into atoms, which can be broken down into neutrons, protons and electrons and so forth. Red doesn't break down into mini red, which doesn't break down into mini mini red. Neither does happiness break down into mini pleasure. The perceptions are irreducible because you can't reduce them to a more base set of components.

Strong correlation would mean that X and Y were always present, but we don't know in which direction.

But, if we try to use Y to bring about X and are unsuccessful, and use X to bring about Y and are successful, then we discovered the direction of causality.

And i guess that would pretty much show that there isn't a causal relationship in neuroscience between dopamine and pleasure. Dopamine causes pleasure, pleasurable thoughts cause dopamine release.

Deepest levels of anesthesia are usually different. There are degrees of that too, but in the deepest degrees, you go to sleep and wake up a split second later wondering when they're going to start the surgery, and the nurse says you're done and it was a successful multi-hour operation. It's sheer oblivion, a total lack of subjective experience, as far as that mind can tell.

This again doesn't really say much about whether consciousness is purely physical or not. Just because we don't have the memory of the conscious experience, or lack the unified coordination of neurons, doesn't mean that consciousness is purely physical. Anesthesia doesn't really sedate us, it actually causes a lot of neuronal noise preventing synchrony of neuronal working. This confusion allows us to not feel pain. But for all we know the individual conscious experience of the neurons stays intact.

So you think individual particles have consciousness?

Wouldn't that mean that mass matters more than organization for consciousness? But clearly the organization itself is what's really important.

I think all particles have an experiential side to them, what we call mental. The organization is important for higher levels of consciousness, but it doesn't mean the nature of consciousness is purely physical.

Firstly, there have been studies on dying rats that show that their brain has a flurry of measurably heightened activity at death. So the idea that a oxygen-deprived brain shouldn't be able to create vivid experiences, doesn't seem necessarily correct. It's hard to do a study on brain activity during human death for practical reasons, but they've at least done it on rats and saw a flurry of physical, measurable activity.

Flurry of activity is a meaningless concept. What matters is whether that activity is coordinated enough to create the experience of an NDE. When starved for oxygen, the metabolism of the neurons should change. They probably start to switch to anerobic metabolism, whose ATP is drastically reduced. The cells would be more concerned with keeping themselves alive and preventing the apoptotic proteins from being released, rather than creating a little imaginary picture for us.

Secondly, certain substances can basically reproduce all of the elements in an NDE.

Yes, have you read the effects of ayahusca? Some of the stuff is eerie and impossible to dismiss when people experience seeing some of the exact same things that their peers have while on the substance. Perhaps drugs alter our minds enough to give us a window into what lies outside our everyday perception.

Third, only a small minority of people experience NDEs. There have been studies on people with cardiac arrest that determined the statistics; I forget the exact number but something like 80% don't experience anything and the 20% do, and then out of those 20%, the vast majority of them just experience something vague like peace or brightness, so only a few percent experience something a bit more complex, and then a subset of them go all the way to tea with Jesus or meeting grandma or having a life review or something. And interestingly, people that do experience an NDE statistically become far more spiritual, and people that do not experience an NDE statistically become far less spiritual.

-Fourth, NDE's conflict with one another. Some come back and say there is no hell, while others come back and say they went to hell and it sucked. Some come back and say there is no reincarnation, and some come back and say that they got to learn about their previously reincarnated selves. Some meet Jesus, some meet an angel of Allah, some meet Hindu gods. There was a study once that studied NDE's across cultures; even fairly basic ideas like whether the person feels peace or not, or whether there's a tunnel, are actually pretty determined by country of origin.

20% is not a small minority. 20% is a considerable minority. And yes the NDE effects are different and the NDE experiences are different, which is why I think that perhaps the mental portion of our minds create these experiences before we die. It's probably the only time when the mental takes over the physical.

 

[Runewolf1973]

Yes, have you read the effects of ayahusca? Some of the stuff is eerie and impossible to dismiss when people experience seeing some of the exact same things that their peers have while on the substance. Perhaps drugs alter our minds enough to give us a window into what lies outside our everyday perception.

Indeed. Shamans don't communicate with the supernatural. They communicate or work wiith things that lie beyond our everyday perception.

 

[Penumbra]

Sorry I forgot about this thread from a while ago. I didn't realize anyone had responded to it.

I'm not a physics or engineering major but aren't you're leaving out energy?

No, because I specifically mentioned electricity. That's most of the energy involved. Also the individual parts are not at absolute zero and thus have some kinetic energy in their atoms and molecules.

Besides, energy and matter are one in the same. One can be converted to the other.

The atoms make up the chips, but the elctrons and photons which give rise to the video game are much more important here than the atom itself. And the very nature of electrons and photons is unknown, because they exist as dualities of waves and particles. Do we know actually what waves are? Or what matter is? At the most fundamental philosophical level the answer is no, we don't. The main argument that a physicalist and a dualist will have is not whether the mind is separate from the brain, but whether the mind is another property of the universe or whether it all just magically pops into existence.

What specifically are you asking when you ask if we know what waves are?

We can describe them mathematically and qualitatively. We can control them, use them, catch them, and build devices to create them.

I don't see much of a link with that point to the discussion about consciousness and it's relation to matter and the brain.

The symbols and numbers are objects created by our very own minds which gave rise to the equations of abstract math. It's how we understand the universe, through our own conscious thinking. Codes are also not really abstract, they follow set algorithmic patterns. Although the algorithmic patterns may be highly complex, they are reducible and traceable.

They're only reducible and traceable because we created them; we know how to reduce and trace them. If you give a computer to a caveman, he can't reduce or trace the workings of it.

The inability to currently trace or reduce something does not logically imply that it is irreducible or untraceable, and as I pointed out many aspects of qualia are reducible and at least partially traceable currently.

The middle steps include more than the atom. They include invisible magnetic fields, energy, electrical charge. All of these are fundamental properties of the universe that are more than what the fuzzy field of the atom shows us. They are new properties of the universe necessary to build the circuit and the code within it. When the concept of magnetic fields first came about it was ridiculed.

Yes there are several parts. Although energy = matter; they're convertible.

Over time with further progress, many physical laws end up being united. For example, electromagnetic radiation (light), is just electric and magnetic waves through space rather than an entirely separate phenomena. And in General Relativity, Einstein showed that acceleration and gravity are the same thing. In another paper he showed that matter and energy are equivalent, E = MC^2. With further scientific knowledge comes new discoveries and further consolidation.

The mental/experiential is the next new field that must exist to a dualist. To deny it's existence is in my opinion to be the same as those who ridiculed the magnetic field a few hundred years ago.

That's like saying software must be a new field apart from computer hardware. It's not.

This isn't "denying" anything. It's critiquing the idea that mental phenomena occupy some separate ground of being than the brain, despite all the evidence to the contrary such as how we can manipulate the physical brain to alter the experience of mental phenomena.

We have a brain, and mental/experiential things are only scientifically known to happen in working brains. And as you tweak the hardware of brains with things like injury or anesthesia or medicine/drugs, you can tweak those mental/experiential things, such as distorting them, expanding them, reducing them, turning them off, turning them back on, through hardware manipulation.

I guess it depends on what you mean by cause then. I believe a causal effect is something that acts as a cause towards creating something else. Saying dopamine is the cause of pleasure is kind of like saying gasoline is the cause of an automobile's motion. There is the whole mechanism involved with pistons and ignition and of course the act of the driver pressing on the accelerator. Dopamine is part of the cause towards pleasure, but there is a whole lot more than dopamine going on.

Point is, someone like Chopra (who holds a view that consciousness is not caused by brains) was trying to say in a debate that dopamine is just a reaction from consciousnesses, correlated but not caused, but was refuted by Shermer/Harris referencing the fact that dopamine can be added and then consciousness changes in certain predictable ways. Various physical things done to the brain, can alter your inner experience.

It's funny how you mention Sam Harris when I posted an article in this thread earlier by him stating that there will never be a physical explanation for consciousness.

It's not a funny coincidence; I mentioned him in response to you mentioning him in this thread. You brought him up as though he supports you, but really he has specifically criticized your position in other aspects, like in his debate with Chopra.

You extrapolate from that article you linked to to form a position he never said. He didn't state, "there will never be a physical explanation for consciousness". He rarely would make a logically sloppy and unsupportable argument such as that. He carefully uses words like "may" or "it's difficult to imagine what [...]" all the time in that article. The point of his article is to explain how difficult the hard problem of consciousness is and then to speculate with some reasoning that there may never be a reductionist answer to it. That's as far as you'll get from him, because he's (usually) careful not to over-extend into saying things that he can't back up. He remains fairly open to the unknown aspects of consciousness but if you watch several of his debates and discussions with people, whenever they bring up speculations of consciousness being a root cause of things, he tends to go on the offensive to dispute it and explain several reasons why that person had bad evidence or faulty logic.

You can have the same levels of dopamine in the brain and still be a much happier person based on your thoughts.

Source?

Also keep in mind that three main neurotransmitters are known to affect mood- dopamine, serotonin, and norpinephrine. Dopamine is related to pleasure and motivation, serotonin is related to calmness and contentment, and norpinephrine is related to a sense of energy and some happiness. They all are evidenced to influence various aspects of the broad idea of "happiness".

So for something like the argument you're making, you'd need to source that a person can be much happier even with low levels of all three neurotransmitters.

Dopamine works on post synaptic receptors which works on the post synaptic receptors which results in different action potentials being generated to create the feelings of pleasure and happiness. Even if you take the electromagnetic properties of the neuron and the action of dopamine, it still cannot fully account for why we feel pleasure, a concept that does not exist in physical reality.

Mathematical computations and equations are things created by our own minds to map out the nature of computation. We embed these computational models into chips and code, we place them into objects which perform them.

The point is, when a logical function exists, you can't ask someone where the logical function is on individual atoms. Or you can, but not reasonably. Because those logical functions do not exist on those atoms, and only occur due to properly organized atoms. It's an emergent property. Our symbols to describe what is occurring, are only symbols.

So to suggest that consciousness can not be an emergent property because we do not have individual fundamental particles of consciousness, is to miss the point of what an emergent property is. There aren't any particles of logic, but various particles can work together to perform a logical function, described by humans to other humans with symbols, but working itself without those symbols.

 

[Penumbra]

Not really, the objections raised by Tegmark were reversed by all the findings in quantum biology over the last several years. There was even a recent article about quantum vibrations found in microtubules.

It's still a fringe theory, and vague. It's not a mainstream accepted aspect of science.

I don't mean reducible in the sense that you can change the amplitude of the perception. By irreducible I mean that it cannot be broken down into anything more simple. For example, color can't be broken down into particles of color. Color just exists on its own. A table can be broken down into atoms, which can be broken down into neutrons, protons and electrons and so forth. Red doesn't break down into mini red, which doesn't break down into mini mini red. Neither does happiness break down into mini pleasure. The perceptions are irreducible because you can't reduce them to a more base set of components.

And logic can't be broken up into little logic particles, and software can't be broken up into little software particles. Why would not being able to break down qualia into little qualia particles be relevant at all here?

Emergent Property.

And i guess that would pretty much show that there isn't a causal relationship in neuroscience between dopamine and pleasure. Dopamine causes pleasure, pleasurable thoughts cause dopamine release.

Can you site a source of pleasure causing dopamine?

And further, can you show a source of pleasure causing dopamine in which that initial pleasure was not preceded by dopamine?

In other words, suppose I create a device that sprays water when marbles fall on it, but it's directed to spray water onto a lever that releases marbles to fall on it.

In a steady state before any action, it's just sitting there, with no marbles falling and no spraying. It's not going to spray without a marble falling on it. So you drop a marble on it, and it sprays into the lever, dropping more marbles on it, spraying at the lever harder to drop more marbles. It's causal from marbles, but there's also a feedback loop where the outputs influence the next inputs; this is the field of control theory. (That was a damn hard class in college.)

The brain is a hugely complex thing, and highly interconnected. I wouldn't be surprised if neurotransmitters release more neurotransmitters under certain conditions. In fact the whole problem with clinical depression is that it's a vicious cycle; some things cause other things which then cause those first things again, in a cycle. Like, depression causes increased chronic sensations of pain (the theory being that neurotransmitters are responsible for filtering out various minor pains when functioning normally but fail to do so during abnormal functioning), and increased sensations of chronic pain can naturally cause sad thoughts which cause further depression, and then further pain. Similarly, exercising can release endorphins which make a person feel better and decrease pain, which can give them happier and motivated thoughts to exercise and that also inherently reduce pain, forming a virtuous cycle.

A point is though, you can have a person sitting there, and then you give her dopamine, and then she feels a certain emotion. Her deeply private inner experience can be altered by external physical means, regardless of what complex interactions happen next.

This again doesn't really say much about whether consciousness is purely physical or not. Just because we don't have the memory of the conscious experience, or lack the unified coordination of neurons, doesn't mean that consciousness is purely physical.

You're the one claiming consciousness can't be physical, can't be an emergent property of the brain. Without precise evidence and reasoning.

You're the one with the positive claim here. I'm not taking the position that consciousness is proven to be from the brain entirely. I'm taking the position that evidence indicates that consciousness comes from and depends on the brain and that this idea that consciousness is somehow separate has little supporting evidence and quite a bit of negative evidence.

-Tweak the brain, and you can tweak consciousness and inner experience, or apparently shut consciousness off entirely.
-All scientifically known examples of consciousness occur inside brains.
-Remove a part of the brain, and you can permanently remove the inner experience of certain emotions from people.

Anesthesia doesn't really sedate us, it actually causes a lot of neuronal noise preventing synchrony of neuronal working. This confusion allows us to not feel pain. But for all we know the individual conscious experience of the neurons stays intact.

Have you been given general anesthesia for surgery?

I have. The experience was that I went to sleep, and subjectively woke up a split second later and was told it was a successful procedure. I subjectively have no recollection of consciousness during it. I wasn't like, "awake and not feeling pain". The "me" that is here now, simply doesn't have any awareness at that time, as far as I can tell.

I think all particles have an experiential side to them, what we call mental. The organization is important for higher levels of consciousness, but it doesn't mean the nature of consciousness is purely physical.

Any well-received mainstream peer-reviewed evidence for this?

Flurry of activity is a meaningless concept. What matters is whether that activity is coordinated enough to create the experience of an NDE. When starved for oxygen, the metabolism of the neurons should change. They probably start to switch to anerobic metabolism, whose ATP is drastically reduced. The cells would be more concerned with keeping themselves alive and preventing the apoptotic proteins from being released, rather than creating a little imaginary picture for us.

Yes, have you read the effects of ayahusca? Some of the stuff is eerie and impossible to dismiss when people experience seeing some of the exact same things that their peers have while on the substance. Perhaps drugs alter our minds enough to give us a window into what lies outside our everyday perception.

Testing a drug in this sense is easy, depending on what the claim is. If people can be given a drug and then reliably come back reporting non-local information (meaning info that they couldn't have known from their own body and senses), then that's some unexplained phenomena about consciousness or telepathy. But if a person merely reports a trip, a cool experience, but it happened entirely in the mind and they have no external information afterward, then there's no reason to believe it was anything other than the workings of the brain.

20% is not a small minority. 20% is a considerable minority. And yes the NDE effects are different and the NDE experiences are different, which is why I think that perhaps the mental portion of our minds create these experiences before we die. It's probably the only time when the mental takes over the physical.

20% is the broadest number, simply for people that say they had some awareness during clinical death (itself unfalsifiable due to some or all of them possibly having awareness during the period right before or right after clinical death, since they often have no reliable means of saying when awareness occurred.) The number of people with a more religious/spiritual NDE is far smaller, like 5% or so, according to that study.

If this was a real transition where a conscious mind was remaining conscious on some other platform without a brain, why do only a small subset of people experience it under the same conditions? If it were a hallucination, we'd naturally expect it to be unreliable, just like how dreams/nightmares and even drug trips can be unreliable, since they're a complex activity of a brain.