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We are not all mindless zombies because consciousness makes brain activity more stable & dynamic

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fathomlessness said:
If information integration theory is true then consciousness can be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex process, for instance electricity running through a computer, data traveling through the electromagnetic spectrum.
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What if information integration theory is false? What if consciousness is not an emergent property of complex processes? Computers, no matter their form, have never once come close to consciousness. They lack something...

fathomlessness said:
A good question is what causes the sweet spot to occur? Why is that it only occurs just when a specific amount of harmony or interaction is achieved? Mathematics? Connection to other dimensions or even nonphysical states?
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Maybe even something that is beyond the detection of our senses? Perhaps psychedelics can give us part of the answer? If so, it's abhorrent that Western cultures repress them...
 
having an interest in consciousness research, i just wanted to add to theoretical definitions of Consciousness..

deep sleep, dreaming, awake..under or not under entheogen..etc..are States of consciousness, but not the medium itself..as huge waves and still ponds are all water..
information is quantised,the medium may not be, hence complexity is not the factor..
in this view, then the brain is a processor, but the 'consciousness' is the receiver, or rather, the medium..
.
 
Valmar said:
Computers, no matter their form, have never once come close to consciousness. They lack something...
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Is that what they told you? How would you know? They may exist like we exist when we close our eyes, hear nothing, feel nothing yet we still are.
 
fathomlessness said:
Is that what they told you? How would you know? They may exist like we exist when we close our eyes, hear nothing, feel nothing yet we still are.
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Computers, for all their history, have never shown any signs of consciousness. And it has never been otherwise.

Computers are just machines that blindly react to input via programming and produce output. Extremely complex programming and hardware doesn't make computers any closer to consciousness than the first computers.
 
fathomlessness said:
You can't argue that the title is misleading if it is just a accurate rephrase of the scientific paper's title, which is "Cortical activity is more stable when sensory stimuli are consciously perceived". Thread title is "We are not all mindless zombies because consciousness makes brain activity more stable & dynamic". Perhaps you misinterpreted. I was saying that if we didn't have conscious awareness then our brains would less stable and less dynamic and be unconscious. If that doesn't sound like a zombie to you then I don't know what does. I was saying that the role consciousness plays is to make our brains more stable and complex, less zombie like which is I think in coherence with the paper title.
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You're conflating correlation and causation: the title of the original paper does not say that one thing (conscious awareness) *causes* another (cortical stability). You are, you are saying that consciousness *makes* brain activity more stable. This is a causal relationship you are suggesting (i.e. that there is something about consciousness that forces the brain into stability) rather than a correlational one (that when brain activity is more stable, consciousness also appears, for unknown reasons).

This study cannot prove causation. Literally everything we know about consciousness is correlational because it is not something that can be directly measured or manipulated BUT there are very strong correlations that run the other way: manipulating the brain does change consciousness.

Valmar said:
Computers, for all their history, have never shown any signs of consciousness. And it has never been otherwise.

Computers are just machines that blindly react to input via programming and produce output. Extremely complex programming and hardware doesn't make computers any closer to consciousness than the first computers.
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Again, how do you KNOW they're not conscious? Can you measure it? Right now what you're doing is arbitrarily decided that some subset of activities disqualifies something from being conscious without a single shred of evidence to back this up. If you can find *direct* evidence that a computer is unconscious, I'd love to see it.

As far as I know, you might not be conscious. After all, from my perspective, your brain is just a squishy machine that blindly reacts to inputss via programming and produce outputs. The science of vision is very clear on this: we can track visual signals as they go in (down the level of individual chemical changes in the eye), travel along the optic nerves, get sent to the thalamus and V1 of the occiptal lobe and processed according to fairly well-understood rules.

Why should I believe that you have a conscious precept of vision, since your visual system is just a computer?

Valmar said:
Maybe even something that is beyond the detection of our senses? Perhaps psychedelics can give us part of the answer? If so, it's abhorrent that Western cultures repress them...
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That may be true, but you're the one making the hypothesis, so it's on you to defend it. With evidence.

Fathomlessness said:
A good question is what causes the sweet spot to occur? Why is that it only occurs just when a specific amount of harmony or interaction is achieved? Mathematics? Connection to other dimensions or even nonphysical states?
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Now *this* is the key question, and by far the most interesting one proposed here. I'd love to speculate on that, and it's one area where I might be open to a more metaphysical hypothesis.

My hunch however is that it's an unanswerable question. The existence of things like Tarski's Undefinability Theorem and the paradoxes of self-reference make me think that it would be kind of like trying to open a box with the hammer inside it.

Blessings
~ND
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
...when brain activity is more stable, consciousness also appears, for unknown reasons)...

This study cannot prove causation. Literally everything we know about consciousness is correlational because it is not something that can be directly measured or manipulated BUT there are very strong correlations that run the other way: manipulating the brain does change consciousness.
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This doesn't prove that consciousness is caused by the brain, either. The "brain is mind" camp hasn't ever produced definite answers that it is.

What if the brain is like a switchboard, with the many knobs that are the neurons? What's turning and tuning the knobs? Matter is supposedly unconscious, and so, we're supposedly zombies... right? How can we think, then? Is consciousness an illusion? It can't be, though, because we think and are conscious. We can think about our brains, and can, with sufficient willpower, override the impulses of the brain. So, we must be more than our brains... the question, really, is, what is the nature of consciousness? We know certain things about the brain, but we still know squat about consciousness, and how it works. It's a bizarre mystery. The ghost in the "machine", so to speak.

Nathanial.Dread said:
Again, how do you KNOW they're not conscious? Can you measure it? Right now what you're doing is arbitrarily decided that some subset of activities disqualifies something from being conscious without a single shred of evidence to back this up. If you can find *direct* evidence that a computer is unconscious, I'd love to see it.
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How do you know that computers are conscious? Have computers, machines, ever shown a shred of consciousness under close, scrutinized study, by those who are unbiased, and experienced in advanced psychology? I know of no such study that has ever shown that computers, no matter the complexity, are consciousness.

But, why are we, and other known living beings? What sets animals, plants, bacteria and fungi, from computers? Are crystals conscious? They grow. But computers only do stuff when they have electricity. You can turn them off for a year, they can collect dust, you can clean the dust away, and turn them back on, and they'll just keep working, if undamaged. Computers need to be programmed... living beings do not. Is instinct the same as programming? I don't quite agree either way. It is, but it's not quite the same as what we do with computers.

Nathanial.Dread said:
As far as I know, you might not be conscious. After all, from my perspective, your brain is just a squishy machine that blindly reacts to inputss via programming and produce outputs. The science of vision is very clear on this: we can track visual signals as they go in (down the level of individual chemical changes in the eye), travel along the optic nerves, get sent to the thalamus and V1 of the occiptal lobe and processed according to fairly well-understood rules.

Why should I believe that you have a conscious precept of vision, since your visual system is just a computer?
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I suspect that we're conflating two differing definitions of "compute". What does it mean to "compute" something? The machines we call "computers"... the innards of a "computer", it's makeup, it vastly different to that of living, biological organisms. We may think that "computers" are complex, but living organisms are vastly more complex. Even the simplest bacterium that science has painstakingly figured out that is, is still vastly complex, and its distinct parts must all be together for said organism to be alive. Any part that is removed will kill said organism.

Not so with "computers". You can replace, and mix and match, different parts of hardware, and even software, and it will just work. Not so with living organisms, at least, not so easily. Organ transplants can be rejected without immune system repressants. "Computers" have no such problem, because they have no hardware that acts as an "immune system".

A complex topic, now I think about it more deeply. :p

Nathanial.Dread said:
That may be true, but you're the one making the hypothesis, so it's on you to defend it. With evidence.
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I posted an article, true. However, those positing that we are machines that react blindly to programming and inputs also must also explain and defend their positions.

It should not be automatically presumed that because there are correlations which seemingly prove to some people that the brain is the source of consciousness, that that is how it is. What if the data can be interpreted differently, to reach another answer that is also valid?

What if "brain is mind" is only part of the answer that is unfairly being given all the attention, blind to other answers?

I do suspect, heavily, from my own experiences, that consciousness is metaphysical. Quantum physics suggests that consciousness is primary to matter, and that conscious awareness has heavy influences on experiments that are done, such as the double slit experiment with photons. Why is it that photons act as particles or waves depending on the observer? Maybe reality isn't as objective or as solid as the materialists conjecture?

Maybe reality is subjective, and heavily dependent on the conscious observer? What if we living organisms, for the most part, share a common reality, and that certain aspects are relative, depending on the consciousness that is observing?

"Brain is mind" is not the final, true answer... it is a possible answer that has, in my opinion, some pretty flimsy, unproven claims behind it.

Again, correlation is not necessarily causation. Just because we can correlate biological activities in certain ways, does not mean that consciousness is caused by the physical body.
 
kolorit said:
(To be) Aware, stems from the word "wary" and thus, can be seen as the highest form of reactiveness, in a sense immediate and spontaneous reaction to action upon oneself.
www.etymonline.com

aware | Etymology of aware by etymonline

"watchful, vigilant," from Proto-Germanic *ga-waraz (source also of Old Saxon giwar,… See origin and meaning of aware.
www.etymonline.com www.etymonline.com

If a meteor, hurling through space at a fast pace, collides with another, bigger one, he is certainly reacting to this experience with the utmost awareness.

Dead matter does not imply the absence of consciousness in my opinion,
maybe this argument is just based upon a difference in categorising the Conscious Spectrum?


On Topic: Those are interesting studys, I will take my proper time to read them, thanks for sharing!
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Does living matter then imply consciousness?

I get much criticism for my opinions that plants are conscious. I don't want to get into the reasons why, it's always a difficult debate, but Ill supply a link which demonstrates some amazing examples of what I'm speaking of

-eg
 
entheogenic-gnosis said:
Does living matter then imply consciousness?
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Indeed. Matter can be influenced by consciousness, so matter must be alive in some sense. Why is matter even considered "dead"? What does "dead" even mean, then, in the context of this topic?

entheogenic-gnosis said:
I get much criticism for my opinions that plants are conscious.
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Plants are far more beautiful than we give them credit for:
 
Ok, I kind of feel like we're going in circles, but here we go.

I am not saying that we can definitively say that consciousness is solely an emergent property of information of the brain. That is far from proven. What I am *trying* to communicate is that, as of right now, there is no evidence, whatsoever to suggest otherwise.

You say 'what if the brain is like a switchboard,' and that's fine, as a thought experiment, but saying 'this is possible' is not evidence for it being true. I have not seen a single shred of evidence that the radio receiver model of consciousness is a better one than the 'emerges from information' model. Never. Not once. I've seen a lot of people, like yourself, suggest that it could be possible, and I acknowledge that that is true, BUT in the absence of evidence, I see no reason to take it seriously.

How do you know that computers are conscious?
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This is getting ridiculous. I did not say computers were conscious. I invite you to find the instance where I definitively said such. What I said was that you cannot make any strong claims one way or another. Consciousness cannot be directly measured, so it is impossible for you to know whether a computer is conscious or not. I personal remain agnostic on the issue.

You were the one who made definitive statements about the internal experience of a computer. Not me.

We may think that "computers" are complex, but living organisms are vastly more complex.
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You're describing a difference of scale, not of kind.

However, those positing that we are machines that react blindly to programming and inputs also must also explain and defend their positions.
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We *are* explaining and defending our positions. I made a list of statements earlier in this topic with a series of facts that anyone invested in non-matrialism would have to reconcile with the observable world. Neither you, nor anyone else, has even attempted this. The best you've done is say 'well what if it's otherwise,' which again, is fine as a thought experiment, but you have provided no evidence to back up your claim.

Here is my evidence, explanation, and defense. I encourage you to respond to *specific points* to rebut.

1) Changes to the structure of the brain changes the nature of our consciousness. If I damage the occipital lobe, my visual perception changes. If I damage Broca's area, I lose the ability to produce speech. If I damage my temporal lobe, I can become face-blind.

2) Changes to the function of individual neurons changes the nature of our consciousness. If I take a drug like PCP that antagonizes NMDA receptors, my consciousness changes. If I take cannabis, my consciousness changes.

3) We can make robust predictions about whether someone is conscious based on the connectivity of the brain, using brain imaging. The same is true using EEG studies. If brain activity is too disorganized and intense, unconsciousness and seizure results, if brain activity is too syncopated and organized, deep, dreamless sleep or anesthesia results.

4) Given extensive enough brain damage, consciousness appears to vanish entirely.

I encourage you to examine this paper:

Now, everything I said IS correlational, I admit it. I cannot say that it *proves* that consciousness is all in the brain, but it does show that the structure, function, and activity of the brain is key to our experience of consciousness. Does that mean that the 'receiver' model is impossible? No, it doesn't, but if you are going to posit the reciever model you need *evidence* that it is a MORE accurate model than the one in which consciousness is emergent from the brain.

Right now, we have strong evidence that consciousness depends on brain function. We have absolutely no evidence that anything other than brain function is required for consciousness. There is no evidence or any kind of nonmatrialstic additional mechanisms, nor any for the radio reciever model. As such, to posit them is scientifically dubious, at best.

Throughout this discussion you have repeatedly made very strong claims without any evidence to back them up. I would respectfully encourage you to pursue some of the existing neuroscientific literature on consciousness and connectomics, as well as information theory. Good researchers who would be good places to start would be:

Dr. Emmanuel Stamatakis
Dr. Giulio Tononi
Dr. Douglas Hofstadter

Blessings
~ND
 
There's a claim being made here, and i've read it before, that the fact that hallucinogens generally tend to decrease brain-activity would somehow indicate that the brain is not producing anything, but that it's rather like a receiver or some kind of filter mechanism.

I just want to ask why that nessecarily would be the case?
 
dragonrider said:
There's a claim being made here, and i've read it before, that the fact that hallucinogens generally tend to decrease brain-activity would somehow indicate that the brain is not producing anything, but that it's rather like a receiver or some kind of filter mechanism.

I just want to ask why that nessecarily would be the case?
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Hallucinogens don't increase or decrease brain activity - they quiet some regions which allows increased activity in others. They do make it more entropic and chaotic though, which is interesting, but very different from 'more active' or 'less active.'

See:
Homological Scaffolds of Brain Functional Networks by Petri et al.,

Blessings
~ND
 
Nathanial.Dread said:
Hallucinogens don't increase or decrease brain activity - they quiet some regions which allows increased activity in others. They do make it more entropic and chaotic though, which is interesting, but very different from 'more active' or 'less active.'
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I see. That doesn't quite explain their vast array of profound effects. There's more than just chemicals at work... though there's certainly a chemical element to it.

Take DMT for example ~ why does that configuration of atoms yield its effects? And how do the brain receptors work with it to produce its powerful effects? These days, I just seem to love crushing, straining and breaking my mind with huge ideas I feel I barely understand.
 
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