Could consciousness be an illusion?

[nazz]

The way I see it, all things are derived from physical processes and the interactions (fundamental forces) of matter. That is a stance that science would agree with I think, and there is nothing further needed. Philosophy and spirituality only confuse things IMO. I always prefered keeping things simple.



---

Fine. Stay ignorant then. Willful ignorance is something I cannot abide so I have nothing further to say to you.

And by the way your statement about what science "thinks" shows you don't even understand science.

 

[nazz]

The Mystery of Consciousness II : : Sam Harris

Here's a great article by Sam Harris

This is even greater because it is coming from a physicalist philosopher who at least understands the problem.

 

[Runewolf1973]

OK, after you answer the last question I posed to you you can take on the question of how the brain stores memories when there is no memory storage or retrieval system within it. Or do you think there is some kind of hard drive up in there?

I made a suggestion or gave an idea to this regard in a previous post... I believe it has something to do with the attracting, fundamental force of gravity. Previous physical interactions or signals we recived to our brain or body in some way "cling" to that matter within our brain and it is stored there. It is almost comparable to how scientists describe the formation of the Earth and the Moon. The early Earth had a violent interaction or collsion with another planet and the remants of that collision came together to form the Moon. The moon is held in place by the gravity of the Earth and in a way "clings" to the Earth like a sort of memory of that past event. Anyway, it is just an idea.

 

[nazz]

This is even greater because it is coming from a physicalist philosopher who at least understands the problem.

I especially loved this quote:

But couldn’t a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness.

- See more at: The Mystery of Consciousness II : : Sam Harris

 

[Penumbra]

It is strongly implied that dopamine causes pleasure, but to be honest we don't know how the particles that interact in the different parts of the brain (such as the nucleus accumbens for example) give rise to what we experience as pleasure. Dopamine is simply a neurochemical and that neurochemical attaches to different post synaptic receptors resulting in electrial spikes which give us what we call pleasure. But how those electrical spikes give rise to the inner subjective experience is absolutely unknown. You cannot claim that dopamine causes pleasure, you can simple say that there is a very strong correlation between dopamine and pleasure. You can even say that there is some sort of causal relationship between dopamine and pleasure, but it is partial. To say that dopamine causes pleasure is to bypass the entire ontological gap between physical processes and conscious experience.

It's logically causal. Meaning X -> Z, if dopamine is X and pleasure is Z. Now, there can be extra steps in there for the full precise description of the chain of events that is currently poorly understood, like X -> Y -> Z. But it's clearly not just X & Z correlated together, or Z -> X. It's X -> ? -> Z.

Again noone is denying that the brain is one of the components involved in the formation of our conscious experience. This proves that the brain is intricately involved in the formation of conscious experience but we're not debating that. We are debating whether the very essence of the property itself is physical or non physical.

Actually I think quite a number of people on RF believe in a meaningful afterlife.

It varies a bit, because some people believe that only a stream of consciousness persists, while others believe they'll get to keep their consciousness and some subset of other things such as personality, memories, etc. Many people also believe that they'll have senses in the afterlife, and moods such as pleasure or bliss.

But then if it's found that dopamine and other chemicals lead to pleasure, deficiencies in those chemicals deny pleasure (clinical depression), senses require complex input systems that lead to the brain, memories and personality can be erased through physical damage, then what is it that can persist outside of the brain, when the brain is dead?

The nature of what consciousness is is itself an interesting question, but the number one application people often want to use the answer for, is whether there can be an afterlife or not. Almost by definition, anyone who believes in an afterlife, believes that consciousness and possibly some of these other aspects can continue to be experienced after death, even though you can shut off someone's consciousness while they're still alive.

Software is algorithmic. Starcraft is algorithmic. As such if something is algorithmic it's reducible. It's easy to break down the software and game into certain patterns which are mapped. Consciousness is non algorithmic because all our perceptions are completely subjective and novel properties which we experience inside and are completely different from the physical processes tied to them.

And a guy shooting a gun in a virtual world is disconnected from the pieces of silicon in the computer. Electricity flows through the silicon in certain ways, and many steps later, the guy shoots a gun.

With consciousness, electricity and chemical signals flow through the brain in different ways. And consciousness is correlated with measurable brain activity- physical changes are occurring when a person is conscious.

What makes you so sure that a form of dualism won't be widely accepted in the future?

I never said that consciousness is surely not something other than the brain. All I've seen though is that people are not able to answer the types of questions that I've been asking in this thread, and that the evidence seems to strongly point to consciousness being an emergent property of the brain that requires the brain to exist in a functional state.

What alternative hypotheses have been proposed with any degree of detail? Discussions about an emergent mind can point to individual brain regions that are causal with our various aspects of consciousness and sapience, where if taken away, those things go away too, in a piecemeal fashion. What similar level of detail has been applied to competing theories? What are the ideas for a mysterious quantity X that also has to be present for consciousness to exist? And what are the qualities of X?

It's not the degrees of perception itself, but the nature of qualia which cannot be reduced. Yes you can feel less love, or hate, or hear different sounds. But how do you break sound down? Or emotions down? They can't be broken down any further because we don't even know what builds them in the first place. You can break down a pyramid into blocks, the blocks into atoms, the atoms into waves or wtv. But you can't break down red into anything because we don't know how energy becomes red.

You can say that, but I've described otherwise. There's a difference between saying we don't know how something is generated, and saying that it's not reducible. Those things are all reducible in terms of precision, amplitude, and complexity. Some sorts of emotions are constructed from multiple emotions, and individual emotions can be experienced with different levels of complexity. They're also reducible in terms of physical processes. Like, you can partially damage a certain part of the brain, and thereby reduce but not eliminate a certain type of inner experience. Or, you can damage that part more thoroughly or remove it entirely, and take that type of experience away or alter it entirely. In other words, partial physical changes can lead to partial reductions in types of qualia. And it's roughly mapped out, like certain brain regions are involved in certain emotions, certain functions, etc.

It depends on how you define consciousness. I define it more along the lines of sentience. You seem to be defining it more along the lines of awareness. Consciousness may be broken down into lesser forms but it comes to a point where it can't be broken down any further because it's very nature is unknown.

Both awareness and sentience can be reduced along a spectrum. In terms of sensing the environment, you can gradually turn down the amplitude and complexity of a person's ability to sense things, from perfect sensing down through partial sensing down to being completely unreactive to stimuli. And in terms of thought, you can turn down a person's ability to concentrate, recall facts, think clearly, down to nothing.

I think it's premature to claim that consciousness just arises out of the brain magically out of completely different properties simply because we have evidence that the brain is tied to conscious experience. The brain is simply electrical potentials and neuro transmitters. If these physical properties give rise to what we experience inside, then to me that either
a) matter has astounding aspects to it which give rise to non matter (property dualism)
b) all matter has mind (neutral monism/panpsychism)

In anyway material monism is impossible to defend.

But there's quite a bit of causal evidence, including piecemeal evidence, and reducibility (like partial damage leading to partial loss in some cases).

Then on top of that besides fringe paranormal researchers, there's no mainstream/repeated/high-quality evidence of a case of consciousness existing without a brain.

Then, from what I've seen at least, there's a lack of a similarly well-evidenced alternative theory for what is causing consciousness, if not the brain.

One can argue back that the brain is a filter, which channels the consciousness of the universe into our reality.

But that's specifically why I mentioned the part about inner experience being shut off by anesthesia. If for most people, anesthesia shuts off their awareness and they wake up 8 hours later and say that they thought they were just put to sleep a second ago, they experienced nothing for 8 hours as far as they can tell, even the perception of time itself, then that contradicts the brain-is-a-filter idea. Because if the brain is a filter rather than the generator, then shutting off the filter would mean that the person can't express consciousness, but that they should still be able to subjectively experience consciousness. But, certain ways of shutting off the brain seem to lead the person to not even having a subjective experience of consciousness, as far as they can tell (and if someone can't tell they're conscious themselves....then basically by definition that's not consciousness).

I don't agree with that notion fully, but then again if you study NDEs and OBEs in enough detail, there are some extraordinary cases where people have conscious experiences for a long time after their brains have no oxygen. The brain is involved in creating what we know as human consciousness, but there might be lesser forms of consciousness as well. For all we know, with anesthesia perhaps we do have a very minimal level of consciousness, incomparable to what we experience now.

I've looked at some of those in considerable detail and a major red flag about this is that there's not much evidence for when they experienced what they claim they experienced. Like, if some guy went into cardiac arrest and then his heart stopped and then he was brought back and said he had tea with Jesus while he was flatlined, we actually have no proof of when he experienced that tea-with-Jesus moment. Maybe he experienced it when he was on the verge of losing consciousness and his brain was hectic. Maybe he experienced it when his heart started again.

 

[Runewolf1973]

Fine. Stay ignorant then. Willful ignorance is something I cannot abide so I have nothing further to say to you.

And by the way your statement about what science "thinks" shows you don't even understand science.

I am an animist after all. My methodology or way of understanding things goes way back...before philosophy, religon, or science even came into the picture. Why would you be all that suprised?

 

[VocoInDubium]

There is no logical or scientific basis for an afterlife belief unless I am woefully behind on current neuroscience.

Consciousness and free will both do seem to be an afterthought explanation to the actions we take based on our genetic and upbringing code.

There are many disconcerting things to consider based on this idea that free will is not what everyone imagines it to be cracked up to be. Sam Harris talks about it in his mini book as in it should take you less that an hour to read called free will. Daniel Dennett disagress on some points and maybe you have a side to pick but ultimately I think Sam makes a compelling argument. Ultimately your body produces X amount of red blood cells but I fail to see how you were free to choose more or less etc etc.

Relevant related video: Sam Harris on "Free Will" - YouTube

 

[Runewolf1973]

There is no logical or scientific basis for an afterlife belief unless I am woefully behind on current neuroscience.

That is correct, and that is why I look at what happens or might happen to us after "death" as merely energy or matter changing form, not something spiritual or supernatural.

 

[atanu]

---But think about it from my perspective...

What is consciousness really, aside from our body or our brain's ability to act, react, and respond to things that affect us?


---

Consciousness enables seeing/knowing of functioning of machines called brain/body and the universe.

Many use consciousness to try to deny consciousness.

 

[atanu]

..

If consciousness exists as something other than an emergent property of the brain, then in your opinion, why is it that if you put a person to sleep for surgery for 8 hours, they will wake up and usually if asked, will say that they had no conception of existence and it felt like they were put to sleep seconds ago. When their brain was partially offline, where was their consciousness in any meaningful form, if consciousness has some independent existence from the brain?

Funny. The example that you are proposing as a proof of consciousness being an emergent property actually points in the reverse direction. How does a person know that he is the same person of 8 hours ago, if there is no consciousness.?

 

[Runewolf1973]

There is no doubt that we have this feeling of being conscious and that consciousness in that way does exist. The illusion is created when people think that it is something non-physical or something which is separate from the rest of physical matter when it is not.

 

[atanu]

There is no doubt that we have this feeling of being conscious and that consciousness in that way does exist. The illusion is created when people think that it is something non-physical or something which is separate from the rest of physical matter when it is not.

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?

 

[Runewolf1973]

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?

Then what specifically is consciousness if it is not something material or physical?

I do believe that consciousness in a way is everywhere and pervades everything, but to me it is something physically existing. It is the fundamental forces of nature at work...those interactions which lead to the formation of matter and its many different forms. Those many forms are all manifestations of those fundamental forces...the same fundamental forces and interactions which give rise to our own self-awareness.


---

 

[atanu]

Then what specifically is consciousness if it is not something material or physical?

I do believe that consciousness in a way is everywhere and pervades everything, but to me it is something physically existing. It is the fundamental forces of nature at work...those interactions which lead to the formation of matter and its many different forms. Those many forms are all manifestations of those fundamental forces...the same fundamental forces and interactions which give rise to our own self-awareness.


---

I know that you must have defined what as per you is physical-material but may I request you kindly re-state it again here? I am sorry for this. I guess that I get it but I wish to be sure.

 

[Runewolf1973]

I know that you must have defined what as per you is physical-material but may I request you kindly re-state it again here? I am sorry for this. I guess that I get it but I wish to be sure.

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.


---

 

[Penumbra]

How does a person know that he is the same person of 8 hours ago, if there is no consciousness.?

Because the memories in the brain are unharmed.

 

[MD]

It's logically causal. Meaning X -> Z, if dopamine is X and pleasure is Z. Now, there can be extra steps in there for the full precise description of the chain of events that is currently poorly understood, like X -> Y -> Z. But it's clearly not just X & Z correlated together, or Z -> X. It's X -> ? -> Z.

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. Without understanding how they give rise to the experience, you cannot simply assume that they do. Even IF you are right, that would mean X and Y have more to their nature than we ever imagined. If strong emergence is true, then property dualism is true.

But then if it's found that dopamine and other chemicals lead to pleasure, deficiencies in those chemicals deny pleasure (clinical depression), senses require complex input systems that lead to the brain, memories and personality can be erased through physical damage, then what is it that can persist outside of the brain, when the brain is dead?

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. 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.

And a guy shooting a gun in a virtual world is disconnected from the pieces of silicon in the computer. Electricity flows through the silicon in certain ways, and many steps later, the guy shoots a gun.

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.

 

[MD]

What alternative hypotheses have been proposed with any degree of detail? Discussions about an emergent mind can point to individual brain regions that are causal with our various aspects of consciousness and sapience, where if taken away, those things go away too, in a piecemeal fashion. What similar level of detail has been applied to competing theories? What are the ideas for a mysterious quantity X that also has to be present for consciousness to exist? And what are the qualities of X?

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'.

You can say that, but I've described otherwise. There's a difference between saying we don't know how something is generated, and saying that it's not reducible. Those things are all reducible in terms of precision, amplitude, and complexity. Some sorts of emotions are constructed from multiple emotions, and individual emotions can be experienced with different levels of complexity. They're also reducible in terms of physical processes. Like, you can partially damage a certain part of the brain, and thereby reduce but not eliminate a certain type of inner experience. Or, you can damage that part more thoroughly or remove it entirely, and take that type of experience away or alter it entirely. In other words, partial physical changes can lead to partial reductions in types of qualia. And it's roughly mapped out, like certain brain regions are involved in certain emotions, certain functions, etc.

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.

Both awareness and sentience can be reduced along a spectrum. In terms of sensing the environment, you can gradually turn down the amplitude and complexity of a person's ability to sense things, from perfect sensing down through partial sensing down to being completely unreactive to stimuli. And in terms of thought, you can turn down a person's ability to concentrate, recall facts, think clearly, down to nothing.

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.

But there's quite a bit of causal evidence, including piecemeal evidence, and reducibility (like partial damage leading to partial loss in some cases).

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.

But that's specifically why I mentioned the part about inner experience being shut off by anesthesia. If for most people, anesthesia shuts off their awareness and they wake up 8 hours later and say that they thought they were just put to sleep a second ago, they experienced nothing for 8 hours as far as they can tell, even the perception of time itself, then that contradicts the brain-is-a-filter idea. Because if the brain is a filter rather than the generator, then shutting off the filter would mean that the person can't express consciousness, but that they should still be able to subjectively experience consciousness. But, certain ways of shutting off the brain seem to lead the person to not even having a subjective experience of consciousness, as far as they can tell (and if someone can't tell they're conscious themselves....then basically by definition that's not consciousness).

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.

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.

I've looked at some of those in considerable detail and a major red flag about this is that there's not much evidence for when they experienced what they claim they experienced. Like, if some guy went into cardiac arrest and then his heart stopped and then he was brought back and said he had tea with Jesus while he was flatlined, we actually have no proof of when he experienced that tea-with-Jesus moment. Maybe he experienced it when he was on the verge of losing consciousness and his brain was hectic. Maybe he experienced it when his heart started again.

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.

 

[newgodthinker]

There is no doubt that we are all part of nature and that there is nothing un- or extra-natural about consciousness. It's all bio/physical/chemical matter, yes. But we THAT through consciousness. So I don't think the mystery of sheer existence is lessened because of the fact that consciousness is, as you say, an illusion.

 

[Runewolf1973]

There is no doubt that we are all part of nature and that there is nothing un- or extra-natural about consciousness. It's all bio/physical/chemical matter, yes. But we THAT through consciousness. So I don't think the mystery of sheer existence is lessened because of the fact that consciousness is, as you say, an illusion.

I kinda like the mystery of it all.