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On Consciousness

Is consciousness physical or metaphysical?

  • Consciousness is a kind of data processing and the brain is a machine that can be replicated in othe

    Votes: 81 86.2%

  • Consciousness requires a second substance outside the physical material world, currently undetectabl

    Votes: 3 3.2%

  • On Planet X, unconscious biological beings have perfected conscious machines

    Votes: 10 10.6%
  • Total voters
    94
  • Poll closed .
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Zeuzzz said:
To expand on this point, can anyone give a possible reason why the subjective experiences people report in such "+5 level" altered states of consciousness seem to be so similar?
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Yeah dude. They're all stone freaks.
Plus, evidently there are mental icons that precede language, and we share a lot of them, and there seems to be a stash of them that get tapped into during the plus 4 or 5 moments.

Bliss is identical for anyone I've ever witnessed experiencing it, including myself.
So is the minus 4 or 5 experience of abject terror.
Both are totally engaging and leave no room for voicing thoughts or reporting back to one's self regarding the experience as it transpires.

I wrote a poem in an attempt to describe my only experience of pure bliss. It was a long time ago. It was a lot of work; not the poem; the bliss.

If I wanted to annoy people, I'd post the poem. I use to study consciousness through observation of my own, which I believe is the same as any one's. Sitting in silence, for endless hours, observing the dissipation of thought; the sub-units of thought; the ripples caused by the slight effort of not voicing thought or its sub-units, until, eventually, the egg cracked and "I" was no more. Just pure awareness, which came with a flood of orgasmic golden, liquid love-light, silly as that sounds.

I remained in that state for 6 hours or so. It didn't matter much that I couldn't maintain it forever. What mattered to me was discovering its existence, and knowing that it was there, for all of us.

This probably doesn't sound very scientific, though it was pure observation.

How else do we study consciousness?

(braced for the assault, and willing.)
 
Zeuzzz said:
To expand on this point, can anyone give a possible reason why the subjective experiences people report in such "+5 level" altered states of consciousness seem to be so similar?
Click to expand...

The same possible reasons why people who have their eyes closed and their eyeballs pressed on seem to report such similar experiences.

The same possible reasons why people who hold their breath until they are about to pass out seem to report such similar experiences.
 
rocketdodger said:
The same possible reasons why people who have their eyes closed and their eyeballs pressed on seem to report such similar experiences.

The same possible reasons why people who hold their breath until they are about to pass out seem to report such similar experiences.
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That's a cheap shot. Or maybe not.

Are no experiences profound, even though sane and scientific types often speak of the profoundness of certain altered states of consciousness?

Yet, you may have a point. Snark free, even. I'm not sure.

You'd need to ask yourself.

A description of extreme nausea, I suppose, would be fairly similar amongst various experiencers of nausea. Same with orgasm, or extraordinary pain.

Yet,

and yet...
 
quarky said:
That's a cheap shot. Or maybe not.

Are no experiences profound, even though sane and scientific types often speak of the profoundness of certain altered states of consciousness?

Yet, you may have a point. Snark free, even. I'm not sure.

You'd need to ask yourself.

A description of extreme nausea, I suppose, would be fairly similar amongst various experiencers of nausea. Same with orgasm, or extraordinary pain.

Yet,

and yet...
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"Profoundness" is just another state of the brain, like needing to pee, laughter, the smell of sulfur, infatuation for Justin Beiber, or deja vous (see Dennett's "The Magic of Consciousnes" for his take on deja vous).

Don't forget that the modules of the brain responsible for these things appeared and then were preserved because the genes responsible for them tended, on balance, to be passed on. The process gave us imperfect modules that are well known to misfire often. You can find profundity in a bathroom tile that's slightly skewed. It does not mean the tile is profound. It just means that for some insignificant reason, it FEELS profound. Our brains are klugy misfiring messes, and becoming comfortable with that reveals more about how the universe works than we'll learn from following all our random feelings of profundity.

Our profoundness module probably evolved millions of years ago to help our ancestors find food, mates, and reason to care for offspring. That's why the module is there. Pattern recognition works for those goals most of the time. That we can find a similar pattern in microscopic images of neural networks and arrangement of the cosmos can certainly trigger the profoundness module, but the module evolved imperfectly, and is likely to misfire and give us worthless leads.

All (probably misfiring) feelings of profundity aside, there's no evidence consciousness is anywhere in the universe but in the brain.
 
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!Kaggen said:
Please remember this when you ask why a computer can't be conscious.
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I only ask why a computer can't be conscious to challenge believers in the magic bean. Maybe you're confusing me with someone else.

I was talking about that universal cosmic consciousness nonsense. There's also no evidence a computer cannot be conscious. In fact, a full simulation of a brain would undoubtedly be conscious. Why wouldn't it be?

...plus I was speaking in the present tense. In the future, we may find evidence of consciousness somewhere outside the brain, but seeing similarity between images of neurons and the cosmos does not constitute evidence of cosmic consciousness.
 
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rocketdodger said:
The same possible reasons why people who have their eyes closed and their eyeballs pressed on seem to report such similar experiences.

The same possible reasons why people who hold their breath until they are about to pass out seem to report such similar experiences.
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This doesn't hold water to me.

There's a difference between poking some-ones closed eyeball with a finger, poking them with a red hot poker or poking them with an acid coated toothpick.

Totally different classes of drugs (tryptamines, ergoline derivatives, opioid analgesics, NMDA agonists) each with completely different Ki value binding affinities to totally different receptors each seem to produce extremely similar effects when +5 states are reached.

Thus such similarities can not be explained by typical neurochemistry.
 
Mr. Scott said:
I was talking about that universal cosmic consciousness nonsense. There's also no evidence a computer cannot be conscious. In fact, a full simulation of a brain would undoubtedly be conscious. Why wouldn't it be?
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It would not have free will and the ability to do any more than it was programmed to.
 
Yeah, i wanted to suggest that the profundity of observing a bathroom tile might not be in the same category as a full-blown dmt experience. Thank god Zeuzzz is here, to take the heat for me.
 
Zeuzzz said:
It would not have free will and the ability to do any more than it was programmed to.
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That's true. In addition to the usual hardware and software, you will need to wire in one "free will and the ability to do more than it was programmed to" bean.
 
Modified said:
That's true. In addition to the usual hardware and software, you will need to wire in one "free will and the ability to do more than it was programmed to" bean.
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Bean?

Magic bean?

I want.

You got?

Can you explain this sentence more clearly?
 
Zeuzzz said:
This doesn't hold water to me.

There's a difference between poking some-ones closed eyeball with a finger, poking them with a red hot poker or poking them with an acid coated toothpick.

Totally different classes of drugs (tryptamines, ergoline derivatives, opioid analgesics, NMDA agonists) each with completely different Ki value binding affinities to totally different receptors each seem to produce extremely similar effects when +5 states are reached.

Thus such similarities can not be explained by typical neurochemistry.
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I know, that's why I brought it up.

Go ahead and press on your eyeball. Seriously.

If one didn't know how the functron filters in the first stages of the visual processing system worked, they might try to attribute the similarity in patterns that *all people* see to some universal consciousness.

However once you know how those work, it is obvious that "oh, they are just malfunctioning" and that causes the patterns and furthermore that since the circuit is the same in all humans, so is the pattern.
 
rocketdodger said:
I know, that's why I brought it up.

Go ahead and press on your eyeball. Seriously.

If one didn't know how the functron filters in the first stages of the visual processing system worked, they might try to attribute the similarity in patterns that *all people* see to some universal consciousness.

However once you know how those work, it is obvious that "oh, they are just malfunctioning" and that causes the patterns and furthermore that since the circuit is the same in all humans, so is the pattern.
Click to expand...
It's called a paradoxical stimulus because the usual stimulus for the rods is visible light, not pressure.
 
Modified said:
That's true. In addition to the usual hardware and software, you will need to wire in one "free will and the ability to do more than it was programmed to" bean.
Click to expand...

I've boiled one up in my laboratory, injected lots of determination, drive, and enterprise until it glowed with a bright violet light of beany independence. It's quite free willy I assure you, and when it's in my robot slave, it won't do anything I tell it to.
 
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