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Has consciousness been fully explained?

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PixyMisa said:
Yes. The details of how the brain works are something we're still piecing together, though we know a great deal.

Consciousness is the easy bit.
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Why are all the discussions about it still going on and popping up every week it seems?

Also, why are some philosophers and cognitive scientists still trying to figure it out?
 
Plat said:
I guess a follow up question would be, how much of it has been explained? or should I even attempt to ask that question?
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There's a huge amount of understanding about the workings of the brain, and how to suppress conscious function. However, how the brain produces consciousness remains no better understood than fifty or a hundred years ago.

That consciousness has not been, and possibly cannot be precisely defined is part of the problem, of course. That's why one popular solution is to define something else, call it consciousness, and claim that it's understood.

Computers are, depending on the proponent, either potentially capable of being conscious, or on the verge of being conscious, or have always been a little bit conscious. The evidence for this is ephemeral, to say the least.

There will almost certainly be posts saying either that consciousness is fully understood and that there's no particular problem. There will also be posts insisting that because consciousness cannot be properly defined, we can't claim that it isn't understood. And some people will get quite upset about consciousness, as it's existence seems to impinge on their beliefs.
 
Plat said:
First off, I have got to properly introduce myself as I have been a lurker here for a very long time and I have learned much from a lot of the posters on here, but yes I have finally gotten around to actually registering lol.

My favorite threads to read on this forum have definitely been about the consciousness because that one particular topic sparks a great interest for me, now on to my question, has consciousness been fully explained? Why is there so much discussion about consciousness?

It might sound like such a newbie and vague question but that is because I am pretty much a newbie when it comes to these types of discussion.
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The question I would suggest you keep handy as the thread develops is "And you know this how?" And if the reply is "We know this because of the X experiment at the Oxford Neurological Labs..." then that's a good response. "So are you really saying that some kind of mystical magical thing..." is a bad response. IMO. YMMV.
 
I don't find it very interesting to discuss since no one can put a finger on what it is. It's a subjective experience, or rather, it IS subjective experience itself, but why is there a subjective experience of subjective experience?


Blaaaargh. You don't get anywhere.
 
Plat said:
I guess a follow up question would be, how much of it has been explained? or should I even attempt to ask that question?
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A fair amount, the main issue that I have is the definition, there is no general 'free floating consciousness' except as an abstract words, almost every thing that gets labeled consciousness is actually a small part of this rubric we label consciousness, there are the sensation which exist prior to them being transformed into perception, there are memories, there are verbal cognitions and other forms of cognition. So the first thing I ask is that people try to identify what they are labeling as consciousness.
Now perceptions we don't understand as much as we do sensations, but despite the nonsense of qualia we do understand a fair amount about perceptions.
Now memory and cognitions we have barely localized and really are just beginning to pull apart.
 
Malerin said:
This ^^

I have no idea if my conscious experience is even remotely similar to yours. How two people experience "green", for example, might be vastly different.
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But the processes are similar , yes?
The photo receptors, the retinal preprocessing network, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, those are similar , yes?
 
Plat said:
Why are all the discussions about it still going on and popping up every week it seems?

Also, why are some philosophers and cognitive scientists still trying to figure it out?
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Well that depends, by what you mean by cognitive scientists, there are some who are neurologists, some who are neurological psychologists, biochemists and some who are just psychologists. Theya re all working on it.

Recently there had been a group which has taken the term and defined it as something different.

Philosophers they are the ones who can't define it, and if you show them the medical definition they get all weird.
 
Dancing David said:
But the processes are similar , yes?
The photo receptors, the retinal preprocessing network, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, those are similar , yes?
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Similar, yes. But the structure of the neurons is entirely different. We couldn't run the same program on two processors that were laid out entirely differently. For all we know, the experience of different people is totally different. I can't think of any way to test this.
 
Plat said:
Why are all the discussions about it still going on and popping up every week it seems?
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Take a look at what goes on in the General Skepticism and the Paranormal section, or Conspiracy Theories. Just because a question is settled doesn't mean that people will stop arguing about it.

Also, why are some philosophers and cognitive scientists still trying to figure it out?
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Cognitive scientists are working on mapping mind function to brain function. Consciousness is one of the things that needs to be mapped.

As for philosophers, well, what I said above about settled questions, doubled and redoubled.
 
westprog said:
Similar, yes. But the structure of the neurons is entirely different. We couldn't run the same program on two processors that were laid out entirely differently. For all we know, the experience of different people is totally different. I can't think of any way to test this.
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I hope you mean that the structure of the neural net work is not exactly the same? however it is set up to do a similar task, yes?
 
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