Is Consciousness A Product Of The Brain Or Is The Brain The Receiver Of Consciousness?

[Old Crow]

Anyway, the thing is why all the biological machinery with eyes, ears, skin, breath, taste and hunger, and this deeper wonder... all because of our complex minds that this awareness bleeds from or into?

Life is darn amazing as we all are...

Children are born where others die, all happens on the same floor from here.


Sorry for all my rambling on in philosophy forum.. I will take a rest now because something a little wonderful always touches me in these conversations, thankyou .

 

[thymamai]

Same thinking about ground of consciousness that we all share? Go to the root of awareness and is it not the same thing for everyone.

Do we have a soul? That's what I want to know. Do we advance along some hidden plane of existence that follows us along a path of growth, or is it just the collective that changes/grows in awareness.

there are.. layers. there are always layers.. and so very many. do we have a soul? you decide.

 

[Old Crow]

It seems logical to me that I have some form of continuation. That could be nothing but ego grasping, however.. we could have a special place among the stars. I dunno, but letting go is a wonderful feeling too.

 

[zapped17]

What if consciousness is a universal field, something like the Higgs Field, or space-time: a fundamental property of the universe and complexity causes the field to 'bend' in the same way that gravity does. The structure of the network that's bending our universal consciousness field dictates the quality of conscious experience by changing the deformation of the field slightly.

Here's my analogy: those keycards you use to get into and out of your office building each create a unique electromagnetic field that can be read. The cards are unique because the different patterns printed on them in magnetic ink create different fields.

Maybe your brain is like that keycard. Each architecture is a little different, so each consciousness is a little different. Anywhere you have integrated information (computers, plants, animals, even maybe molecules and atoms) creates a tiny dimple in the field of consciousness and has some 'level' of consciousness corresponding to the depth of the dimple.

In this model, information does not *create* consciousness, nor does the brain receive it, but rather, consciousness is a universal fundamental that information bends towards it in the same way that mass bends spacetime.

I was sort of inspired by Phillip Pullman's idea of 'dust' with this.

awesome, man. didnt expect to find a response here that at all hit home for me. pretty much agree with this viewpoint

I agree, very well said Nathaniel.Dread. I think there is a lot of validity to a theory of consciousness like this, and it fits in with some of the views I mentioned earlier. I've never heard of Philip Pullman - I'll definitely have to check him out. It does have some other precedents: It reminds me of a few of Colin McGinn's ideas, and in particular a paper by Piet Hut and Roger Shepard, called "Turning the hard problem upside down and sideways," wherein the authors postulate a property "X" - which is taken to be similar or analogous to an additional dimension of space-time - where "X" stands to consciousness as time stands to motion. Just as time enables the existence of motion in combination with space, "X" enables the existence of consciousness, in combination with the basic dimensions of space-time. And so, as the complexity of a mass-energy system increases (one might say, in terms of informational integration), so does its consciousness.

I think a view like the one you mentioned has the ability to explain a number of phenomena that cannot be accommodated within a more "reductive" or purely materialistic theory.

 

[universecannon]

Many of my experiences seem to hammer home pretty hard the implication that consciousness somehow permeates the multiverse...or is fundamental to it...in some way. I would guess it may be somewhat like ND said, in that it has some sort of field-like properties.