Tangent by PhD student in Cognitive Science here - My current belief is that consciousness arises at the cross section of 3 core skills: Theory of Mind [0], Autobiographic Episodic Memory [1], and Embodied Cognition [2].
Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contribute to who you are, and that you are a physical being that can think in-situ as well as plan your physical actions in the future.
I'm favoriting this link and will try to return to it after my dissertation is done for reflection.
There are actually two problems, that people often mix up. One is how we get a sense of self, which I think is what you're talking about. Another is how qualia, like the perception of color, arise at all. Nobody seems to have any idea how that happens; we have no way to map some arrangement of atoms to a perception and prove from first principles that one leads to another.
Thanks for sharing. My own pet theory is very similar to yours: humans evolved consciousness in order to ‘observe’ our cognitive and emotional state, so that we can build models and apply them to reason about other people’s cognitive and emotional states. It’s hard to have ‘theory of mind’ about someone else when you don’t have access to your own mind to start with.
This sounds similar to claims I've heard that consciousness arises from language. Taking a component of our cognition which is heavily intertwined with the rest of it and taking its ubiquity to imply some sort of primacy.
To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still be capable of seeking goals, and of abstract thought. They would still have moral standing and personal dignity - it would be immoral to mistreat them, and we would consider that human rights still apply to them.
We are deeply social animals, and this is integral to our sense of self as we usually see it, but I'm not convinced it's integral to consciousness.
I have a similar objection to your second point. Lacking a sense of personal narrative and timeline would constitute a serious disability, but would not render a person unconscious. If you had total retrograde amnesia, you would still be conscious.
I see the same problem with your third point. I'm confident that, under the right concoction of psychotropics, my mental function could be degraded to the point that I would be unable to reason effectively about my future, or to make decisions, while still keeping me conscious. Someone suffering something akin to shell-shock might be unresponsive, but still conscious.
Thoughts about Epiphenominal explanations of the mind?
I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.
Please forgive me for Going There, but I believe [2] is also Original Sin, even in a secular definition as a generic source of evil perpetrated by humans against humans.
Yes, let's move the soul from being an emergent property of the staggeringly complex arrangement of billions of neurons to their electromagnetic byproducts. It's cool because instead of grappling with the consequences of material reality we can satisfy our dualists instincts by ascribing consciousness to mystic energy despite it being equally mechanistic in the eyes of modern science.
I want to see the college debate where the negative position fires a HERF gun and asks the audience if they feel like they just lost their souls. (Given our mobile phone addictions, many might say yes.)
This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.
I would be thrilled to hear somebody's theory of consciousness that takes into account the following axioms:
1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff.
2. Consciousness affects matter. The water crystal experiments by Masaru Emoto(b) are the simplest and least fringe example. Project love, hate, anger, etc. to water results in changes to the crystal structure of water when frozen.
I tried to keep it as non-fringey and simple as possible. If you consider these, it leads to the framework that consciousness is not emergent from the physical brain but is instead a field or carrier-wave from somewhere else and brains act like antenna receivers.
"Commentators have criticized Emoto for insufficient experimental controls and for not sharing enough details of his approach with the scientific community.[9][17] In addition, Emoto has been criticized for designing his experiments in ways that leave them prone to manipulation or human error influencing the findings.[9][18] Biochemist and Director of Microscopy at University College Cork William Reville wrote, "It is very unlikely that there is any reality behind Emoto's claims."[9] Reville noted the lack of scientific publication and pointed out that anyone who could demonstrate such a phenomenon would become immediately famous and probably wealthy.[9]"
Those two axioms would make a fantastic sci-fi novel.
The second one isn't that interesting to me philosophically, but your first questions gives rise to so many questions about human nature, free will, etc. Also, it would give credence to the theory that we are just one giant super consciousness. it'd also have the added affect of making the concept of war super brutal.
No. There's no evidence for that. There's an incredible mountain of evidence supporting the idea that neuronal action potentials are. The currents in neurons aren't even in the direction of the action potential propagation. They're perpendicular to it and only over a handful of tens of nanometers. Yes, the substrate of our macroscopic reality is dominated by electromagnetics but the brain isn't a very conductive place.
but it begs the question; why? Obviously there is a biological necessity for these forms of propagation. I remember reading an old neuroscience textbook that said glial cells were purely support cells but they are finding a-lot of emergent phenomenon there as well.
Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it?
Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and the subconscious in the brain.
It's like the "I" is an impostor taking over the body. Theories and writings around the "soul" have been around since the dawn of civilization.
Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke?
Even as a physicist (sorry) I can see a clear evolutionary utility of consciousness. If all organisms as a rule are guided towards an optimal state (survival, reproduction, etc.) based on sensory input and a learned world model, then the second order evolutionary trait that would help an organism the most is executive access to the optimizer itself or the ability to synthesize a phase space of possibilities through imagination/dreaming. Both of these aspects may be what we call consciousness.
>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Think of it in terms of salience. Why do we need multiple levels of salience, such that some signals are intrinsically more important than others to the bearer of those signals? The answer is that once organisms were able to move under their own power, there needed to be a mechanism for the organism to have an intrinsic interest in its own well-being. A plant doesn't move under its own (intentional) power. It has no power to move itself into a damaging state nor move itself out of one. An intrinsic salience to its bodily integrity would serve no purpose. But once organisms were able to move based on goal-directed behavior, say to seek out food, it needs to have an interest in its bodily integrity such that it doesn't intentionally move into a damaging state.
An intrinsic salience to nociceptive signals, i.e. the suffering of pain, gives organisms an innate interest in its bodily integrity. To evolve the same behavioral patterns without pain's intrinsic suffering quality would require evolving an organism that had an innate comprehension of why it is important to avoid damaging states, i.e. declarative representations of value which would require complex intelligence to co-evolve. Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious.
But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states.
It's most likely connected with an ability to create models of reality (or intelligence). If you want to achieve certain change in environment, you need to be able to speculate on the state of the future and how to achieve it. In order to do that, one needs to be able to access the memories and locate some actions and consequences they had. Consciousness can be then seen as a root cause of those actions, especially when modelling the future.
Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.
The 'self conscious I' can make logical inferences about the future and decisions about one's own wellbeing that are sometimes at odds with our lower impulses which govern most of our behaviour, and that's mostly it I think.
'Hunger' is something that has been with us for 200 million years of evolution.
'Emotions' since the dawn of Mammals roughly.
Developed cognition to the degree where we can even try to very conscientiously adapt our behaviour towards achieving goals - this is a very new thing.
I think it makes a lot of sense that we 'really want to eat that cupcake, but also try not to'.
Well, here's my hypothesis: first, humanity's greatest invention is society. Our ability to work together to achieve larger aims--hunting, planting, protection, invention, etc--makes us unique.
This explains, for example, the complexity of language.
But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our role in society, the benefits we gain from pro-social behaviour, etc
> "Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke? "
This suggests a common bias that you feel like the human species is the only one on this planet that has attained consciousness. Many other species are conscious, sentient, we just happen to the one that have gone into space. Regardless of it's a fluke or not it's clearly an advantage used by many species on the earth.
>Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex.
> Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert.
We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of being hungry and sleepy, etc. It also takes care of basic memory storage and emotional imprinting. It's the oldest brain, evolved as a simple logic operator, where it evaluates an input, and then triggers a response. Hungry? Look for food. Scared? Run. Etc. It learns and stores memories too. I nearly got eaten when I went over there, scary, tag that place memory with a bad feeling.
Then we have a more advanced mammalian cognition level, where more advanced behaviors came from, more complex memory indexing making the reptile brain more useful for long term storage and more nuanced learning. Daytime over there is fine, night can be scary. Oh, that scary thing over there is actually safe, but let's be careful there anyway. More advanced social interactions, forming packs and such with social hierarchies.
Now we also have a more advanced logical component and pattern matching ability. A rustling of that specific type of bush tends to mean there's a lion in there. When I see dark clouds, I should find shelter because water might fall. I can take this stick and push it in this anthill to get ants, or I can take this other stick and knock down fruit I can't reach. Rocks from over here chip really well when I bang them together the right way, and I can use the result to cut things. Now we see high order logical cognition emerge.
That leads to a part of the brain that helps coordinate the other parts of the brain leading to the ability for abstract thought, symbolic thought, and internal monologue for enhanced creative thinking. This part of the brain is what we think of as "us", our "mind" but it's just a part. Other parts aren't as verbal. That's why sometimes ideas "just come to you", and something you can't quite recall is on the tip of your tongue, another part of the brain was working independently, and pushed that information over to your forebrain, or your forebrain remembers a trigger for a memory, but the memory part isn't quite picking up on the index cue. It's why we "sleep on things", or go for walks and need time to think, we're letting our various parts work independently so they can not worry about communicating with each other for a bit and focus. It's why you get "in the zone" when you're really productive, and it's even why we go on "autopilot" and get home but don't remember the drive, our forebrain shuts up for a bit, or is naval gazing and the other parts took over the drive.
I'm not saying these are the only parts, but ever since reading Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" and learning evolutionary physiology it's a concept that made a lot of sense. I don't think it's all as subdivided or mindless as Minsky think, but I REALLY think is over all concept is dead on.
In short, consciousness doesn't arise FROM anything, consciousness is what the brain is doing. It's not a side effect, it's the main one. We just think it's special and different from animal cognition because we have language. We think and feel just like dogs and cats and elephants, just in a more complex fashion.
A simple argument for electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness:
The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness.
The brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.
the paradigm with consciousness is that there is a "thing" that has experiences, at the basest level an _experience_ of thought parallel to the _process_ of thought.
to wit this is decartes "thinking thing" that gives rise to cogito ergo sum.
First person consciousness is just a fundamentally different thing than any third person property of reality such as matter or energy or electricity. These sorts of ideas are just category errors, like trying to determine what number 1 tastes like.
My untested hypothesis is that fungi trigger an otherwise vestigial sense that allows us to perceive an energy that we have a symbiotic relationship with
The nature of the symbiotic relationship is not known, and the capabilities of this relationship have not been explored
Since the brain can communicate between both hemispheres without a corpus callosum[0] I think it is obvious that our brain does interact with itself via electromagnetic fields.
It is a travesty that this guy is a department head somewhere, with serious responsibilities for, at least, students, and pushing this BS.
Might EM fields and waves have a role in brain operations? Sure. Does that have anything at all to do with us perceiving our own cognition? Absolutely no way!
Cars have (1) spark plugs that emit radio pulses, and (2) a radio in the dash panel. Therefore, spark plug E-M pulses control traffic flow? No.
The biggest mystery about consciousness is that anybody thinks there is anything at all mysterious about it.
[+] [-] TheHideout|5 years ago|reply
Principally, recognizing that other people have intentions and beliefs different from your own, being able to understand that you have experienced a timeline of personal experiences and these contribute to who you are, and that you are a physical being that can think in-situ as well as plan your physical actions in the future.
I'm favoriting this link and will try to return to it after my dissertation is done for reflection.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episodic_memory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
[+] [-] DennisP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glial|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falseprofit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|5 years ago|reply
To your first point: consider a hypothetical person who is unable to recognise other people as being similar to themselves, i.e. as having minds of their own. We would treat this person as having a serious social disability. We certainly wouldn't conclude that the person lacks consciousness entirely. They could still be capable of experiencing pain and pleasure, and could still be capable of seeking goals, and of abstract thought. They would still have moral standing and personal dignity - it would be immoral to mistreat them, and we would consider that human rights still apply to them.
We are deeply social animals, and this is integral to our sense of self as we usually see it, but I'm not convinced it's integral to consciousness.
I have a similar objection to your second point. Lacking a sense of personal narrative and timeline would constitute a serious disability, but would not render a person unconscious. If you had total retrograde amnesia, you would still be conscious.
I see the same problem with your third point. I'm confident that, under the right concoction of psychotropics, my mental function could be degraded to the point that I would be unable to reason effectively about my future, or to make decisions, while still keeping me conscious. Someone suffering something akin to shell-shock might be unresponsive, but still conscious.
[+] [-] mjangle1985|5 years ago|reply
I'm a former philosophy student that had general interests Philo of Mind and that always stuck out to me as the most reasonable explanation for consciousness.
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
Please forgive me for Going There, but I believe [2] is also Original Sin, even in a secular definition as a generic source of evil perpetrated by humans against humans.
[+] [-] argomo|5 years ago|reply
I want to see the college debate where the negative position fires a HERF gun and asks the audience if they feel like they just lost their souls. (Given our mobile phone addictions, many might say yes.)
[+] [-] FrameworkFred|5 years ago|reply
This seems all kinds of testable. Construct apparatus to significantly interfere with the fields, turn it one, then look for changes...if it's really something fundamental to consciousness, that should be discernible one way or another.
[+] [-] micksabox|5 years ago|reply
1. Consciousness demonstrates quantum non-locality. The U.S government via 3 letter agencies studied psychic phenomena like remote viewing for over 30 years under various names including Project Stargate(a). and was studied at Stanford Research Institute by scientists like Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff.
2. Consciousness affects matter. The water crystal experiments by Masaru Emoto(b) are the simplest and least fringe example. Project love, hate, anger, etc. to water results in changes to the crystal structure of water when frozen.
I tried to keep it as non-fringey and simple as possible. If you consider these, it leads to the framework that consciousness is not emergent from the physical brain but is instead a field or carrier-wave from somewhere else and brains act like antenna receivers.
References a. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project b. https://mitte.co/2019/10/14/the-curious-study-of-water-consc...
[+] [-] bulletsvshumans|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masaru_Emoto#Scientific_critic...
[+] [-] RhodoYolo|5 years ago|reply
The second one isn't that interesting to me philosophically, but your first questions gives rise to so many questions about human nature, free will, etc. Also, it would give credence to the theory that we are just one giant super consciousness. it'd also have the added affect of making the concept of war super brutal.
[+] [-] ajkjk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superkuh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RhodoYolo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bserge|5 years ago|reply
Regardless, my question is why did consciousness arise? What was the need?
Would humans not have been able to achieve unprecedented control over the environment without it?
Everything I read about self-control (which is a major problem of mine) points to an eternal battle between the conscious self and the subconscious in the brain.
It's like the "I" is an impostor taking over the body. Theories and writings around the "soul" have been around since the dawn of civilization.
Clearly, it worked for the species, but was it really necessary or just a fluke?
[+] [-] lokimedes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|5 years ago|reply
Think of it in terms of salience. Why do we need multiple levels of salience, such that some signals are intrinsically more important than others to the bearer of those signals? The answer is that once organisms were able to move under their own power, there needed to be a mechanism for the organism to have an intrinsic interest in its own well-being. A plant doesn't move under its own (intentional) power. It has no power to move itself into a damaging state nor move itself out of one. An intrinsic salience to its bodily integrity would serve no purpose. But once organisms were able to move based on goal-directed behavior, say to seek out food, it needs to have an interest in its bodily integrity such that it doesn't intentionally move into a damaging state.
An intrinsic salience to nociceptive signals, i.e. the suffering of pain, gives organisms an innate interest in its bodily integrity. To evolve the same behavioral patterns without pain's intrinsic suffering quality would require evolving an organism that had an innate comprehension of why it is important to avoid damaging states, i.e. declarative representations of value which would require complex intelligence to co-evolve. Consciousness is the solution to the problem of competent behavior without comprehension.
[+] [-] ordu|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, this is the right question. All these proposition like "consciousness is an alpha-rhythm", or "consciousness is a EM waves" are just an destructive reductionism, trying to get rid of something too difficult to understand and to replace it with something of much easier nature. It is like attempts to reduce the problem of "free will" to a physical determinism. Free will is a psychological or social phenomena, it couldn't be equivalent to a physical phenomenon. It could be explained in terms of a physical phenomena. Maybe. (In this particular case I believe it is pointless.). But if proposition draws an equal sign between phenomena from completely different levels of abstraction, we must be suspicious.
But, ranting away, what is a consciousness? I like the most this explanation[1]. Consciousness is a tool to communicate with others and nothing more. All the thinking, decision making are done without help of consciousness, somehow the process is reflected in the consciousness, which allow to communicate the decision itself, motives behind the decision, and so on. Does explanation in terms of EM waves adds something to it? After this EM waves doesn't seem as an explanation at all. It is like ask what is async/await and to answer that it is all about transistors switching states.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
[+] [-] rzodkiew|5 years ago|reply
Imho, self-control is about the energy expenditure and the fact that brain is optimising for the energy conservations. Habits, addictions and other available models of reality are cheap to access. Conscious self on the other hand requires much more energy to create new models of reality, therefore your brain will try to avoid them as much as it can.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
It may be just a property of matter. If you set up matter in certain way, it gains consciousness. And that certain way is needed for intelligence.
Maybe another good question is can intelligence exist without consciousness ?
[+] [-] jariel|5 years ago|reply
'Hunger' is something that has been with us for 200 million years of evolution.
'Emotions' since the dawn of Mammals roughly.
Developed cognition to the degree where we can even try to very conscientiously adapt our behaviour towards achieving goals - this is a very new thing.
I think it makes a lot of sense that we 'really want to eat that cupcake, but also try not to'.
[+] [-] CarelessExpert|5 years ago|reply
This explains, for example, the complexity of language.
But it also explains the evolutionary benefits of consciousness. I would claim that for society to function we need a sense of self, as that allows us to reason about our role in society, the benefits we gain from pro-social behaviour, etc
Basically, without an "I" there's no "we".
[+] [-] djmips|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everdrive|5 years ago|reply
Presumably for social awareness and theory, for the purposes of child care and social living. Reading the intent and feelings of others. In other words, anything with a Cortex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex
[+] [-] burnte|5 years ago|reply
I have my own theory that explains what, why, and how. First, there is no singular consciousness, that's an illusion created by only one part of the brain having an internal verbal monologue. I think that we are actually a collection of smaller consciousnesses working in concert.
We have the reptile brain for basic functions, it's aware of being hungry and sleepy, etc. It also takes care of basic memory storage and emotional imprinting. It's the oldest brain, evolved as a simple logic operator, where it evaluates an input, and then triggers a response. Hungry? Look for food. Scared? Run. Etc. It learns and stores memories too. I nearly got eaten when I went over there, scary, tag that place memory with a bad feeling.
Then we have a more advanced mammalian cognition level, where more advanced behaviors came from, more complex memory indexing making the reptile brain more useful for long term storage and more nuanced learning. Daytime over there is fine, night can be scary. Oh, that scary thing over there is actually safe, but let's be careful there anyway. More advanced social interactions, forming packs and such with social hierarchies.
Now we also have a more advanced logical component and pattern matching ability. A rustling of that specific type of bush tends to mean there's a lion in there. When I see dark clouds, I should find shelter because water might fall. I can take this stick and push it in this anthill to get ants, or I can take this other stick and knock down fruit I can't reach. Rocks from over here chip really well when I bang them together the right way, and I can use the result to cut things. Now we see high order logical cognition emerge.
That leads to a part of the brain that helps coordinate the other parts of the brain leading to the ability for abstract thought, symbolic thought, and internal monologue for enhanced creative thinking. This part of the brain is what we think of as "us", our "mind" but it's just a part. Other parts aren't as verbal. That's why sometimes ideas "just come to you", and something you can't quite recall is on the tip of your tongue, another part of the brain was working independently, and pushed that information over to your forebrain, or your forebrain remembers a trigger for a memory, but the memory part isn't quite picking up on the index cue. It's why we "sleep on things", or go for walks and need time to think, we're letting our various parts work independently so they can not worry about communicating with each other for a bit and focus. It's why you get "in the zone" when you're really productive, and it's even why we go on "autopilot" and get home but don't remember the drive, our forebrain shuts up for a bit, or is naval gazing and the other parts took over the drive.
I'm not saying these are the only parts, but ever since reading Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" and learning evolutionary physiology it's a concept that made a lot of sense. I don't think it's all as subdivided or mindless as Minsky think, but I REALLY think is over all concept is dead on.
In short, consciousness doesn't arise FROM anything, consciousness is what the brain is doing. It's not a side effect, it's the main one. We just think it's special and different from animal cognition because we have language. We think and feel just like dogs and cats and elephants, just in a more complex fashion.
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op03|5 years ago|reply
You can't be in great battles with yourself without language arising. So where ever language arises, Consciousness of some sort follows.
Ants I doubt have great self control problems cause language hardware is primitive.
[+] [-] boxed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1necone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bondarchuk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falseprofit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackinthebochs|5 years ago|reply
The brain is composed of discrete units undergoing local interactions following the laws of physics. Conscious experience is a seamless unified whole. But there is no way to arrange parts into a whole; it is necessarily a collection of parts. Therefore the brain, a collection of neurons, does not constitute the seat of consciousness.
The brain's electrochemical dynamics constitutes the fluctuations in the electromagnetic field within the brain. The electromagnetic field of the brain is a seamless unified whole. Therefore (as the only remaining possibility), the seat of consciousness is the electromagnetic field within the brain.
[+] [-] Santosh83|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sjg007|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rolph|5 years ago|reply
to wit this is decartes "thinking thing" that gives rise to cogito ergo sum.
[+] [-] yters|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpoacher|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] barrenko|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobby-coder-guy|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] vmception|5 years ago|reply
The nature of the symbiotic relationship is not known, and the capabilities of this relationship have not been explored
[+] [-] yk42bb|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.kurzweilai.net/unexplained-communication-between...
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
Might EM fields and waves have a role in brain operations? Sure. Does that have anything at all to do with us perceiving our own cognition? Absolutely no way!
Cars have (1) spark plugs that emit radio pulses, and (2) a radio in the dash panel. Therefore, spark plug E-M pulses control traffic flow? No.
The biggest mystery about consciousness is that anybody thinks there is anything at all mysterious about it.