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Explain consciousness to the layman.

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JM85

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So, the elements formed together to form the first living organism. This much I understand, but what about consciousness? This is never really explained, besides "neurons firing together in the brain" to form it, but this explanation never goes further than that when I hear it.

I know this question has probably already been asked in a more eloquent and intelligent way, but that's why the title has the word layman in it. I also ask, because theists or people in the new age mind set usually put a lot of emphases on consciousness as proof of their beliefs. I want to know how it can be explained by physical laws.
 
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Consciousness is perhaps the biggest problem there is, no one understands how it arises. The existence (or non-existence) of qualia is an important aspect of it that is quite easy to understand - how does a physical object like a brain develop feelings and experiences, such as the redness of an object or the roughness of a surface?
 
leon_heller said:
Consciousness is perhaps the biggest problem there is, no one understands how it arises. The existence (or non-existence) of qualia is an important aspect of it that is quite easy to understand - how does a physical object like a brain develop feelings and experiences, such as the redness of an object or the roughness of a surface?
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Oh, good, I thought this one was due again.

Can I be the first to assert that there's nothing difficult to understand about consciousness and that qualia just shouldn't be mentioned? If I don't I'm sure someone else will.
 
leon_heller said:
Consciousness is perhaps the biggest problem there is, no one understands how it arises. The existence (or non-existence) of qualia is an important aspect of it that is quite easy to understand - how does a physical object like a brain develop feelings and experiences, such as the redness of an object or the roughness of a surface?
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Light enters the eye and is transmitted to the brain, it called the sense of sight.

We touch a surface and the nerves in the fingers send a signal to the brain.


No great mysteries here unless you're going to call natural processes mysteries.
 
Strange that Pixy's not here: SRIP!, read GEB!, just computations! There, that should be enough.
 
westprog said:
Oh, good, I thought this one was due again.

Can I be the first to assert that there's nothing difficult to understand about consciousness and that qualia just shouldn't be mentioned? If I don't I'm sure someone else will.
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You can mention it if you can define it.
 
westprog said:
Oh, good, I thought this one was due again.

Can I be the first to assert that there's nothing difficult to understand about consciousness and that qualia just shouldn't be mentioned? If I don't I'm sure someone else will.
Click to expand...


Qualia should not be mentioned - wrong, useless, silly, and wrong.

I do not agree that "there's nothing difficult to understand about consciousness". Feel free to explain it clearly and succinctly if you think it is so easy to understand.
 
In a test to see the conscious functions of the brain in an MRI, scientists stimulated the brain with a shock directly while subjects were both sleeping in the scanner, and awake.

When asleep, only the area where the shock was administered showed any activity, what you would expect to see when shocking the arm or any other appendage.

But when awake, the shock showed multiple regions all around the edges of the brain going off in concert, and it's this networking of neural processes which consciousness seems to emerge from.

Stunningly complex and seemingly elegant and ordered emergent properties arise from astronomically complicated interactions. Consciousness seems to function in the same way, and is a result of a massively complex network of interactions.

In humans it seems to arise from a number of sensory input streams all constantly seeking to determine what one is doing and where one is. The brain can be fooled even into thinking your frame of reference is outside of your own body with clever visual illusions.

Check out this documentary on the subject, The Secret You:

 
You know how when you're asleep and everything is cool and then you start to notice your back hurts and you open one eye and it's fifteen minutes before your alarm goes off so you try to close your eyes again but now your back is really starting to hurt and you can't find a good position so you go to the bathroom and start taking your medicine and then the alarm goes off and it scares you half to death because you thought you turned it off when you got out of bed but you never did?

That's consciousness.
 
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Consciousness is the ability to interact with existence and know you're doing it and you've done it.
 
tsig said:
Light enters the eye and is transmitted to the brain, it called the sense of sight.

We touch a surface and the nerves in the fingers send a signal to the brain.


No great mysteries here unless you're going to call natural processes mysteries.
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It's not that easy.

If it were, an iphone would be conscious for interpreting touch and light.

Consciousness implies internal motivation as well. An iphone doesn't "care" about what touched it. It immediately responds to what touched it in a mechanical way.

You poke me, a dog, and an iphone. The phone just launches whatever protocol based on touch. A dog and me wants to assess the poke. We'd take a rough poke as a form of aggression. But if we had a past experience with the thing poking that's taken in consideration. An owner or loved one joking is accepted. A dog would be more instinct but I could think deeper on the poke. If it's a stranger but not threatening, is it some psychological experiment? Maybe something's wrong with them for inappropriately poking in this social context. And so on.

I could have a reflex based on a poke. Making that reaction similar to the iphone.

But that one input can have various internally motivated results rather than one simple mechanical or electrical result.

If an Iphone just started launching programs and typed in whatever it wanted with no external stimulus or intended internal programming, then we could wonder if it's conscious.

So I'd say a guideline for consciousness is that the object in question is acting without an immediate external stimulus or performing routine operations.
 
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Kahalachan said:
It's not that easy.

If it were, an iphone would be conscious for interpreting touch and light.

Consciousness implies internal motivation as well. An iphone doesn't "care" about what touched it. It immediately responds to what touched it in a mechanical way.

You poke me, a dog, and an iphone. The phone just launches whatever protocol based on touch. A dog and me wants to assess the poke. We'd take a rough poke as a form of aggression. But if we had a past experience with the thing poking that's taken in consideration. An owner or loved one joking is accepted. A dog would be more instinct but I could think deeper on the poke. If it's a stranger but not threatening, is it some psychological experiment? Maybe something's wrong with them for inappropriately poking in this social context. And so on.

I could have a reflex based on a poke. Making that reaction similar to the iphone.

But that one input can have various internally motivated results rather than one simple mechanical or electrical result.

If an Iphone just started launching programs and typed in whatever it wanted with no external stimulus or intended internal programming, then we could wonder if it's conscious.

So I'd say a guideline for consciousness is that the object in question is acting without an immediate external stimulus or performing routine operations.
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Do you agree that consciousness resides in the brain?
 
Consciousness seems to be an abstract model of the self, that can be held for moments at a time, in the brain.

It has its initial roots in the simple stimulus/response actions of simple cells, but it also incorporates neurons, which are cells that communicate the state of other cells across the body. Networks of neurons can develop into ever more complex "maps" of the body. Consciousness seems to be a momentary state in which an "autobiographical" map of the self can be held. But, the devil is in the details. We have yet to know precisely how this happens. But, we are gaining more knowledge about this every day.

A book I read, recently, called Self Comes to Mind, by Antonio Damasio, contains the best evolutionary pathway I've seen, so far, for human consciousness.

It is worth mentioning that a few arguments you commonly hear about consciousness don't hold water:

"Free Will is an Illusion": This tells us nothing about free will, and everything about the limits of the person's mind who is saying it. It is much more informative to investigate how consciousness works ("illusion" or not). If it IS an illusion: How does it come about? If it turns out not to be one: How does actual free will emerge?

As for the claim that "qualia shouldn't be mentioned": That's also a position of asserting ignorance over knowledge. Yes, we SHOULD understand how qualia comes about (even if it is only an "illusion"), otherwise you're NOT really explaining anything!

ETA: Claiming that the "self" is separate from the "conscious mind", as philosophies are generally prone to do, has never been productive in explaining consciousness. The best approach, from a scientific stance, is to let "self" be at the fundamental core of consciousness. That is where actual answers seem to be coming from, these days.
 
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tsig said:
Do you agree that consciousness resides in the brain?
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I'm not quite sure.

By analogy, it'd be like saying the internet resides only in computers. But it also encompasses all the processes of the computers communicating with each other, server processes, information in transit, the effect the internet has on the world outside of it which feed back into affecting the computers that affect the internet.

We produce hormones that affect our way of thinking, a cluster of neurons just doesn't make something conscious cause praying mantises have clusters outside of their head. I seriously doubt Terri Shavo's brain housed any consciousness towards the end even though it was a brain that was living.

I won't assign consciousness this spooky origin like a soul. But it's this complex network not easily defined and understood and has natural physical origins.

I am a materialist and am fine with reductionism. But to me reducing consciousness to a bunch of brain cells is like talking about war in regards to all the motions of the subatomic particles that took place. Yep all these bullets traveled at whatever velocity and biological organisms killed each other but that's not really talking about war.

I think Daniel Dennett said it right when he said consciousness is what the brain does.
 
Presumably, a brain has to reach a certain level of complexity before consciousness appears. I suppose that one day it will be known which animals possess it, and which don't.

I remember an (American) biology teacher ridiculing me when I stated that dogs could think. He must have been influenced by Skinner, it was around 1958, when his views were popular with some people.
 
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