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Consciousness

suren said:
The hard problem of consciousness is not a scientific problem, it's a metaphysical philosophical question whether there is something else alongside to plain physical processes, perhaps being dependent from them. It's a question whether our subjective reality (feelings, thoughts, experiences, etc) is an abstract thing (just a label for a combination of molecules) or something that really exists in some dimension (perhaps even independent) of the reality. It's somewhat similar to the simulation problem, where we can't be 100% certain that the world around us is a simulation or not.

So there is no "explanation" for it, since it's not a phenomena that can be displayed. However this is a question that plenty of people care of because it has a significant overlap with ethical questions.

Some philosophers think that the reality might be neither mental nor physical but instead there is one substance where the mental and the physical are parts of it, aka neutral monism.
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Yes, say philosophers. That's all they say. But how brain functions create awareness is a scientific concern.
 
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Steve001 said:
Yes, say philosophers. That's all they say. But how brain functions create awareness is a scientific concern.
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And here's the thing about that: science has discovered more about the mind, and done more to solve issues with it, in a few short decades, than the competition (philosophy, religion, etc.) has in THOUSANDS of years, and they really, REALLY hate it. They hate that their centuries of mulling over the issue and producing endless volumes of twaddle has been completely ineffective at giving us these answers and solutions, while the cold, "rigid" methods of science have brought us revelation after revelation.

Make no mistake: philosophy is in the same position as religion -- all of its promises and theories fell flat, and they are slowly being relegated to the dustbin of history. Like a cornered, wounded animal, they lash back, but their end is inevitable.
 
Thermal said:
Belz..., if I whip out my junk and drop it in the ketchup bottle, and no one else had access to that information, I would submit that my junk was nonetheless objectively in that evening's dinner condiment.
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Was it real junk or merely a construct of your mind. Was the ketchup conscious? What were it's feelings about the event?

All valid philosophy, right?
 
I would have thought there's a reasonable evolutionary reason for pain. It tells us when we have been injured. It tells us to stop doing something that is injuring us. Sure, it goes wrong sometimes and like a lot of things it's not very precise. But the absence of pain is, I gather, a real problem for people with paralysis, heavy nerve damage, or extreme intoxication.

As to whether there's a difference between pain and the experience of pain, I think that depends on whether nerve signal that causes what we experience as pain cause any other predictable results in a person who is entirely devoid of consciousness - e.g. a person with brain death. I don't know what, if any, other events might occur that are explicitly and exclusively caused by the nerves that transmit pain (not talking about other reflexes we might expect to accompany it). We could then get into an endless argument about definitions of things, a new version of whether an unheard tree falling in the forest makes a sound. Absent any confirmation that pain does anything other than trigger the sensation of pain, and steering clear of the ontological black hole of how a radical empiricist might define "experience," I default to presuming that pain and the experience of pain are the same.
 
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Scorpion said:
I said I had a series of electric shocks of over a hundred volts passed through my brain, and since the brain works on less than half a volt such a large shock should have completely wiped my memory permanently. But it didn't. My memories returned within a week.

Therefore memories are not stored electrically.

That is my experience, and it is absolutely true.
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You do not understand your own treatment.

From electroshockWP (redirected to Electroconvulsive therapy)

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment where a generalized seizure (without muscular convulsions) is electrically induced to manage refractory mental disorders.[1] Typically, 70 to 120 volts are applied externally to the patient's head resulting in approximately 800 milliamperes of direct current passed through the brain, for 100 milliseconds to 6 seconds duration, either from temple to temple (bilateral ECT) or from front to back of one side of the head (unilateral ECT).
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There is an old saying, "It's not the volts, it's the amps that kill you."
 
bruto said:
I would have thought there's a reasonable evolutionary reason for pain. It tells us when we have been injured. It tells us to stop doing something that is injuring us. Sure, it goes wrong sometimes and like a lot of things it's not very precise. But the absence of pain is, I gather, a real problem for people with paralysis, heavy nerve damage, or extreme intoxication.

As to whether there's a difference between pain and the experience of pain, I think that depends on whether nerve signal that causes what we experience as pain cause any other predictable results in a person who is entirely devoid of consciousness - e.g. a person with brain death. I don't know what, if any, other events might occur that are explicitly and exclusively caused by the nerves that transmit pain (not talking about other reflexes we might expect to accompany it). We could then get into an endless argument about definitions of things, a new version of whether an unheard tree falling in the forest makes a sound. Absent any confirmation that pain does anything other than trigger the sensation of pain, and steering clear of the ontological black hole of how a radical empiricist might define "experience," I default to presuming that pain and the experience of pain are the same.
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Probably not allowed to experiment on the "brain dead" given the inability to give consent.

That aside with fMRI we can now pretty much in real time watch what happens when people are experiencing pain or remembering pain. We find the experience of pain and the remembering of pain involve different sections of the brain with some overlap.

What a lot of those that think something other than science is needed to explain our minds don't seem to know is how much progress we have made into how the brain functions - we've already shown that what the brain does (well part of what it does) is "mind/consciousness". There isn't anything else involved or to explain.

We can now from brain scans work out what someone was reading when the scans were done! We've been able to "decode" what photos or images someone is looking at for about 10 years and it's got better and better as the technology is developed. We can even do the same for when people are "imagining" an image i.e. the mind's eye. Telepathy via technology is certainly a plausible prediction these days.
 
Darat said:
What a lot of those that think something other than science is needed to explain our minds don't seem to know is how much progress we have made into how the brain functions - we've already shown that what the brain does (well part of what it does) is "mind/consciousness". There isn't anything else involved or to explain.
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Ahhh..... how about no Mr. Fancy Pant science person.

How you forgotten about our good friend qualia?

Yes your cold, hard, sterile, joyless, science can literally explain everything about taste of an apple but can it explain.... THIS TOTALLY MADE UP ADDED ON AND UNDEFINED "EXPERIENCE" OF THE APPLE?

Ha. Didn't think so. *Drops mic*
 
JoeMorgue said:
Ahhh..... how about no Mr. Fancy Pant science person.

How you forgotten about our good friend qualia?

Yes your cold, hard, sterile, joyless, science can literally explain everything about taste of an apple but can it explain.... THIS TOTALLY MADE UP ADDED ON AND UNDEFINED "EXPERIENCE" OF THE APPLE?

Ha. Didn't think so. *Drops mic*
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Science can explain literally everything about the color red, except for what it looks like.
 
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