I was also poking fun at PM and the
No
Wrong
Not even wrong
Absurd
In your response the me, even though I'm saying the same thing as PixyMisa qualified against long term consequences, you aren't telling me I'm wrong, but sort of waffling. When your response specified "during development" PixyMisa stated: "Which in no way contradicts what I just said". This effectively proves PixyMisa's statements and mine are essentially identically. Yet in narrowing down the distinctions with you, your agreements with me points to a wishy washy yes and no. So what are the distinctions?
Neither PixyMisa or I are denying that sensory input is needed for
development of our sense of consciousness. Neither of us are denying that when the stored data about
past sensory data degrades that consciousness will degrade accordingly.
Now here's the kicker, everything required to maintain consciousness
in the here and now is fully contained in the physical brain contained in the skull, without any sensory inputs or connections to the world external to the brain. That consciousness would degrade over time, due to a lack of maintenance provided by these inputs, is immaterial to that fact. Degradation is merely a mechanistic consequence of the way our brain is constructed, not an absolute condition from loss of sensory inputs.
sort of responses.
As I have stated many times perception is a large amount of what is conflated in the rubric of consciousness. Perception is dependant upon sensation, so much of consciousness, not all, would be gone.
What you appear to be saying here is that if I look toward my keys on the desk and don't see them, some of my consciousness is gone. Taken from a 'toy' model perspective, this indicates that a tank of compressed air, that doesn't have a gauge reading the pressure (sensory data), isn't compressed.
By conscious mind two things can be indicated. One is working memory, which is limited to 3 or 4 bits of information. Even though those bits can be bit representations of a much larger set of data, in which longer term memory must be accessed to obtain information about. The second is the world model, stored in memory. The model used in your head to make sense of the sensory data and world around you. In fact illusions are created by creating expectations from your world model, when in fact it is not so, nor even what your senses are actually telling you. You then see your world model instead of what your senses actually see, and call this memory contained in your brain external sensory data.
This world model was modeled from sensory data of the past, but does not disappear just because ALL sensory data from the external world disappears. And so long as it persist it can feed working memory bits to define your consciousness, even with a complete and total blackout of ALL sensory data external to the brain grey matter itself. Consciousness IS fully contained in the grey matter of the brain, irrespective of what external data was involved in its development.
And that is why PixyMisa said:
Which in no way contradicts what I just said.
Proves PixyMisa's statement was meant in the same sense mine were, with the only difference being the qualifications of of precise sense that was.
yes.
yes, part of teh isue is the confusing morrass of what we label consciousness.
No and yes, the two are part and parcel.
It would be hard to gauge any sort of behavioral criteria for it. Certainly not for the medical definition. I suppose if you reconnected the brain then you could ask for a self report.
It appears the breadth of empirical science you are making presumptions from is intensely limited. In fact we have a far better gauge than any "behavioral criteria" can ever dream of conceiving. We can watch your thoughts and know which predefined choices you are going to make before you do. It's even making its way into the gaming market. Buy yourself a brain wave game controller for $99.99. Its primary limitation is signal quality issues without implanted sensors inside the brain. "Behavioral criteria" makes it sound like we're stuck in the 1940s.
I was just disagreeing, I do not think that there is any part of the brain that is not part of the body. Many parts of 'consciousness' are dependant upon sensation. Some things I agree with, others I don't.
I am fairly certain you haven't disconnected brain yet.
And I am fairly certain that sensation and perception are part of developing consciousness. And part of what gets labeled as consciousness.
I am not making an absolute statement.
We haven't done brain transplants, but we have done head transplants. From a consciousness perspective the only role the body plays is to keep the brain alive, feed it sugar. We have sliced off pieces of rat brains, grew them on a substrate, and used it as a robot control mechanism connected through bluetooth. We know exactly what do do to your brain so everything is normal, except that you will not recognize your mother while looking at her. Even though you'll agree it looks like her and you'll recognize it's really her on the phone. I'll not even get into the terabytes of more detailed empirical data.
If you want to hang onto the notion that consciousness is some kind of whole body phenomena, base it on something more than 1940s style "behavioral criteria".
