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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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Is it consciousness that manifests physical reality or is it physical reality that gives rise to consciousness? That might be the wrong question. And that instead it is both consciousness and physical reality manifesting together as one whole unit. That's a holistic perspective.

Not only that. The physical body is an inseparable part of the whole universe. So consciousness in turn, is located in the nervous system yet not totally isolated. From a holistic perspective consciousness and the whole universe form a unified inseparable whole.
 
PixyMisa said:
No, not holistic, just wrong.
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It's a holistic perspective. The human mind is very powerful at making separations. The problem is that it often makes separations of everything! In reality reality is one inseparable wholeness in the sense of absence of total separation.

Compare with an isolated system. There is actually no such thing as an actually isolated system in existence. It's a useful approximation, yet it's not something really real.
 
May as well argue with Pixy a bit:

I think you are wrong, yet, I also think that the nature of reality is willing to prove you right.

Suppose the pre-big-bang singularity was conscious.
Well, how could it be?
It had no building blocks for that.

Yet, potentially, at least, it obviously did.
If it was conscious, then it spread that field around.

All we've ever witnessed is through being conscious. We have no evidence otherwise.
Similarly, motion is all we have witnessed.
Perpetual motion.
 
Zeuzzz said:
...if talking about the evolution of art and language then altered states of consciousness would have provided a tremendous advantage in terms of natural selection.
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How exactly does tripping provide a tremendous selective advantage in language evolution? Language is about communication and purposeful social interaction. Tripping most definitely isn't. Mildly psychotropic stimulants or relaxants like weed, or khat, or tobacco, or coffee, or coca leaves are more plausible - and we do indeed find them in widespread use throughout history.

If talking about foods with an effect on gene expression then populations that ingested the food that randomly increased genes relating to brain size would be more likely to survive in terms of mental capacity evolutionarily.
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Such as what? supposing 'randomly increasing genes relating to brain size' can be twisted to have some biological meaning, which foods did you have in mind that do this?

<... selective advantage of hunting while tripping or stoned ...>

Mckenna called this the stoned ape theory of human consciousness.
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It has all the hallmarks of a theory created by a stoned ape.
 
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dlorde said:
How exactly does tripping provide a tremendous selective advantage in language evolution? Language is about communication and purposeful social interaction. Tripping most definitely isn't. Mildly psychotropic stimulants or relaxants like weed, or khat, or tobacco, or coffee, or coca leaves are more plausible - and we do indeed find them in widespread use throughout history.
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Not wanting to add too much sample bias to the argument but I challenge you to find a person that is a well known public speaker that has a vocabulary as diverse as Terrence Mckenna, since you are arguing against language from psychedelics.

He literally runs loops around syntactical language, and ties it up in a succinct knot at the end of most of what he says.

I am not making an argument from authority from him. He is no authority. Just a person. And a rather open minded and well educated person at that. I am simply asking that you listen to him speak and post your conclusions about what he says here, in the spirit of the forum.

Such as what? supposing 'randomly increasing genes relating to brain size' can be twisted to have some biological meaning, which foods did you have in mind that do this?
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None. It was an hypothetical example of a magical food to prove the extreme extrapolation of my main point.

It has all the hallmarks of a theory created by a stoned ape.
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Which you likely evolved from.

Unless you can actually address my previous points coherently I can't rule out this possibility.
 
Did you know LSD is a drug capable of causing psychotic symptoms in people that have never taken it?

A whole bunch of people were driven psychotic by not taking LSD; and they made it illegal.

I'm not advocating its use, I'm just pointing out a cultural bias.
 
Consciousness? Yes, of course LSD is illegal. In today's monoculture, it is mathematically impossible to be otherwise. I believe that being is not only awareness of being, but also a kind of quantum emerged data (I'm close to Penrose), a constant state of anosognosia. We will never know. Don't you get it? Those who do are prone to insanity for a reason. We can never express it with our language and of course it is wrong of me to talk about it. It just cant be explained without using tools we havent yet really grasp. Look what happened to Cantor ;) Consciousness for now is like trying to measure infinity. We dont really have realize what Godel's incompleteness theorems made clear.. (sorry for my English, I wish i could write better) And since Higgs boson has been discovered, I am close to epiphenomenalism ;)
 
Mr. Scott said:
Yea, there is more than one definition. There's A) "not unconscious" and there's B) "not a zombie."

My thermostat is conscious by definition A (it's aware of the temperature) but not by B (it's an unthinking zombie).

This thread is about B: zombie, or not zombie.
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Bull. Zeuss's definition of conscious roughly equates with "high," Pixy favors SRIP or SNAFU or w/e, and quarky seems to gravitate around whatever makes the least sense given the conversation at hand.

As for myself, I should probably reiterate my position: that "consciousness" is a piss-poor term that is meaningless to argue about because no two people have the same definition, despite each of them feeling their definition is the one both are arguing about, and for the bits they can agree on there's always a more precise term to use instead. For example, your zombies - "self-aware" would better describe what they aren't. "Conscious" is a terrible word for anything but the opposite of "unconscious," and the sooner all its other uses fall out of the public lexicon, the better.
 
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Nice post.

Now explain your statements in the context of the posts the provoked it, directly.

Feel free to choose any of the material I have posted as a reference to back up your above stereotype of my posts with a coherent and logical reply.
 
I can go down the road of unconsciousness, or subconsciousness, just as readily as you have just brought up those terms. But you need to define their meaning first for a productive dialogue to ensue.
 
Zeuzzz said:
Did you know LSD is a drug capable of causing psychotic symptoms in people that have never taken it? A whole bunch of people were driven psychotic by not taking LSD; and they made it illegal.

I'm not advocating its use, I'm just pointing out a cultural bias.
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Well that would certainly cut down on the price of a dose.
 
Tsig this thread is about (primarily) human consciousness.

Something you seem to have no experience of.

You can now prove my knee jerk reactionary opinion totally wrong by posting something of substance.

Or you can not.
 
Zeuzzz said:
Tsig this thread is about (primarily) human consciousness.

Something you seem to have no experience of.

You can now prove my knee jerk reactionary opinion totally wrong by posting something of substance.
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Seems your posts are about (primarily) taking substances.
 
Beelzebuddy said:
Bull. Zeuss's definition of conscious roughly equates with "high," Pixy favors SRIP or SNAFU or w/e, and quarky seems to gravitate around whatever makes the least sense given the conversation at hand.

As for myself, I should probably reiterate my position: that "consciousness" is a piss-poor term that is meaningless to argue about because no two people have the same definition, despite each of them feeling their definition is the one both are arguing about, and for the bits they can agree on there's always a more precise term to use instead. For example, your zombies - "self-aware" would better describe what they aren't. "Conscious" is a terrible word for anything but the opposite of "unconscious," and the sooner all its other uses fall out of the public lexicon, the better.
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Hey, I started this thread and decided what it's about. Read post #1 and the attached survey to find out what this thread is actually about.
I spun it off from the thread "Define consciousness for the layman," so I consider arguing the definition of conscious to be a derail. We are assuming the term to be adequately defined for the expert, but just not fully explained, since there's a prevailing intuition that it has supernatural or noncomputational basis.
 
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