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Consciousness: The Fun Part. :)

Maia

Graduate Poster
Maia
Joined
Jul 20, 2009
Messages
1,259
There are some ideas about consciousness that seem as if they'd be very interesting to discuss, but that other consciousness thread just doesn't seem to be the place for them. Turing tests and algorithms and scary math and computers and -- :covereyes

Anyway, can we just take it as a given here that of course consciousness arises from the brain? (Where else would it come from??) Then we don't have to spend all of our time hashing over that particular point and endlessly getting stuck at the starting gate, and we can actually start to talk about some interesting things. :) Maybe these would be the neural correlates of consciousness, maybe these would be discussions about whether or not different ideas were correct, who knows. One question that fascinates me revolves around what Susan Blackmore has to say in this article:

(lots of studies about the illusion of the "stream of vision" as the neural correlate of consciousness)

There is no stable, rich visual representation in our minds that could be the contents of the stream of consciousness.

Yet it seems there is doesn't it? Well does it? We return here to the problem of the supposed infallibility of our own private experiences. Each of us can glibly say 'Well I know what my experience is like and it is a stream of visual pictures of the world, and nothing you say can take away my experience'. What then do we make of the experiments that suggest that anyone who says this is simply wrong?
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Well, the first thing that came to my mind was that a person blind from birth certainly wouldn't say this or anything like it. What would their neural correlate be? In fact, I wouldn't say it. I've had a lot of visual problems, and I already know just how inaccurate visual information really is. Isn't a subjective interpretation about consciousness being claimed even though it may not exist? Is this a basic problem with the entire "stream of vision" argument?

Discuss! ;)
 
Maia said:
Anyway, can we just take it as a given here that of course consciousness arises from the brain?
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Can we take it as a given that after it arises from the brain it is not trapped in the brain?
 
Maia said:
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was that a person blind from birth certainly wouldn't say this or anything like it. What would their neural correlate be? In fact, I wouldn't say it. I've had a lot of visual problems, and I already know just how inaccurate visual information really is. Isn't a subjective interpretation about consciousness being claimed even though it may not exist? Is this a basic problem with the entire "stream of vision" argument?

Discuss! ;)
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Has anyone ever found away to stimulate the brain of a person blind from birth in such a way as to induce something akin to visual stimuli? That'd be pretty cool :)
 
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Maia said:
Well, the first thing that came to my mind was that a person blind from birth certainly wouldn't say this or anything like it. What would their neural correlate be? In fact, I wouldn't say it. I've had a lot of visual problems, and I already know just how inaccurate visual information really is. Isn't a subjective interpretation about consciousness being claimed even though it may not exist? Is this a basic problem with the entire "stream of vision" argument?
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I'm not entirely clear on what a neural correlate is (skimmed over a wiki article). If it becomes painfully apparent that I haven't got this right, let me know.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the idea makes sense to me. Without sensory imput, there would have been no impetus for sophisticated brain development. As far as mind-body things go, it's crucial to remember that they had to have developed side-by-side, in terms of each other.

While a blind person might not say that, I'm not convinced they'd be right. Ask a blind guy what he sees and he'll tell you, and the fact that he knows -- even if it's "nothing", the circuits are on. It's probably a mistake to assume that any one sense is "the stream" -- it's likely a combination or them all, including external touch and internal nerves.

One clue to the importance of the senses to consciousness might be what happens in sensory deprivation tanks: people just kind of go nuts there. It might be interesting to rate the importance of each sense by comparing deprivation with one sense on at a time. Be surprised if it wasn't already done, actually.
 
Maia said:
Anyway, can we just take it as a given here that of course consciousness arises from the brain?
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Unfortunately not.

You could try posting on the science forum, though. At least you'd get a different set of crazy objections.
 
I am still conscious when I close my eyes so my consciousness doesn't reside in visual input.
 
Dogdoctor said:
I am still conscious when I close my eyes so my consciousness doesn't reside in visual input.
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I presume we all mean consciousness in the widest possible sense, as the totality of our conscious mind and our unconscious mind, the totality of the psyche, which is more than just our mere ego-awareness...the aspect of us that says "I" is not all there is to consciousness.
 
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Limbo said:
I presume we all mean consciousness in the widest possible sense, as the totality of our conscious mind and our unconscious mind, the totality of the psyche, which is more than just our mere ego-awareness. The aspect of us that says "I" is not all there is to consciousness.
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You may mean that but the quote from the OP asks about people who say their experience (conciousness?) is a stream of visual pictures of the world.
 
Dogdoctor said:
You may mean that but the quote from the OP asks about people who say their experience (conciousness?) is a stream of visual pictures of the world.
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It seems to me that assertions like those in the OP fail if intuitive awareness is real.


The Psychophysiology Of Intuition: A Quantum-Holographic Theory Of Nonlocal Communication

Abstract

This work seeks to explain intuitive perception—those perceptions that are not based on reason or logic or on memories or extrapolations from the past, but are based, instead, on accurate foreknowledge of the future. Often such intuitive foreknowledge involves perception of implicit information about nonlocal objects and/or events by the body's psychophysiological systems. Recent experiments have shown that intuitive perception of a future event is related to the degree of emotional significance of that event, and a new study shows that both the brain and the heart are involved in processing a pre-stimulus emotional response to the future event.

Drawing on this research and on the principles of quantum holography, I develop a theory of intuition that views the perception of things remote in space or ahead in time (nonlocal communication) as involving processes of energetic resonance connecting the body's psychophysiological systems to the quantum level. The theory explains how focused emotional attention directed to the nonlocal object of interest attunes the bio-emotional energy generated by the body's psychophysiological systems to a domain of quantum-holographical information, which contains implicit information about the object. The body's perception of such implicit information about things distant in space/time is experienced as an intuition.

[...]

Is this the fun part? :p
 
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The question I find interesting about consciousness is "How could we tell if something was conscious if the scale of the entity were vastly different from our own?" For example, Douglas Hofstadter includes a character of an ant hill in Godel, Escher, Bach in some of the more whimsical portions of that book. Ever since reading it, I have wondered how we would be able to tell if an ant hill were a conscious entity.
 
Beth said:
The question I find interesting about consciousness is "How could we tell if something was conscious if the scale of the entity were vastly different from our own?" For example, Douglas Hofstadter includes a character of an ant hill in Godel, Escher, Bach in some of the more whimsical portions of that book. Ever since reading it, I have wondered how we would be able to tell if an ant hill were a conscious entity.
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Ask it.

That reduces a problem of philosphy to one merely of language, which we can solve scientifically.
 
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