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Goodbye Jesus

Where Does Consciousness Originate?


LeikelaRae

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Hi, all!

I've been researching a lot lately about evolution and the Big Bang, which I do believe in now as there is evidence of it actually occurring. However, I started thinking about how all beings (humans, animals, etc.) have a consciousness and an individuality filled with emotions and thoughts. I began researching a little on the topic, but I was curious for your opinions. Can evolution created consciousness, individuality, and emotions?

If you have any references or links on the topic, I would really appreciate them! :)

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Consciousness is something a health brain can create.

 

 

Edit:

I think this old clip from Sam Harris might be relevant.

 

 

The mind comes from the brain.  I know he gave that answer in response to a religious

 

perspective but I think the same argument apples to this non-religious context.

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Look into emergence and emergent properties.

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This topic is a topic on my "to-do" list as well.  The theory that currently has wide-spread acceptance, as far as I can tell, is that mind is a natural phenomenon that is generated as a result of the process of biological evolution.  Mind is an adaptation just like the hand is an adaptation -- as a tool that enables survival and reproduction.  I think that you can read about this topic in Daniel Dennett's book "Darwinism's Dangerous Idea."  The Christian counter-argument is found in C.S. Lewis's book "Miracles" that says that "Each particular thought is valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Obviously, then, the whole process of human thought, what we call Reason, is equally valueless if it is the result of irrational causes. Hence every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs. Which is nonsense." (p. 28; Ch. 3).  This is certainly an interesting plan of inquiry!  I personally have a hunch that the evolutionary explanation of reason is more persuasive, as I count persuasion.

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By manipulating the brain, consciousness is manipulated. It would seem that's the reason "expanding consciousness" or "spiritual experiences" are brought about by brain altering behaviors such as prolonged chanting and deep meditation, drugs, electrical stimulation, chemical imbalance, disease, trauma, etc. Therefore I find it hard to believe that consciousness resides somewhere independent of brain function.

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David Chalmers has some good stuff on this as he, I believe, was the first to coin the term "hard problem of consciousness." Humans are very complex biological organisms, but everything a human can do can conceivably be performed without the added element of consciousness. Chalmers refers to philosophical zombies (p-zombies, if you will) that act just like humans do, but are not self aware and do not have any subjective experience. Why are we not p-zombies if a p-zombie would be just as good as a human at surviving and propagating its genes? What need is there for consciousness?

 

Philosophy of mind is a very interesting subject. I feel like it is one of the few fields where philosophy is very much still relevant. It is a great mystery as to why we are conscious and what it even means to be conscious. Perhaps consciousness, while dependent on a physical brain, can not be reduced solely to the activity of the brain.

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Consciousness originates in the soul.

 

Case closed.

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Perhaps consciousness, while dependent on a physical brain, can not be reduced solely to the activity of the brain.

 

Why not?  I don't see any reason to think consciousness exists or takes place outside the physical brain.  Humans invented the idea of a soul at a time when they had no idea about physiology (or anatomy, beyond the naked eye).  Sure, science has not yet found adequate answers about consciousness but who is to say it won't?  I'm satisfied that we know enough to infer that consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain.

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     I am the source of all consciousness.  Anything you perceive to the contrary is just illusion.  If you believe that you are the source of my consciousness that is also illusion. 

 

          mwc

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I'm just going to leave this here:

 

Technical Paper (Consciousness as a State of Matter by Max Tegmark, arXiv: 1401.1219v3)

 

Summary

 

Very Brief Overview

 

Some interesting ideas in there. It will be interesting to see if this gains traction.

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A book on this subject that I found interesting was "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. Who knows if he's right, but it's an interesting read.

 

And a link to an article about feelings that come from the gut.

 

 https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200704/gut-almighty

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I'm just going to leave this here:

 

Technical Paper (Consciousness as a State of Matter by Max Tegmark, arXiv: 1401.1219v3)

 

Summary

 

Very Brief Overview

 

Some interesting ideas in there. It will be interesting to see if this gains traction.

I breifly read the summary. That's very interesting! Thanks for sharing! I guess my struggle right now is coming to terms with the fact that perhaps there is no "soul" in the human body, and that we can evolve continuously in conciousness.

 

I just don't understand totally what makes me, me. If that makes sense. How come I am myself and not someone else? It seems almost supernatural so to speak.

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It may seem supernatural, but let's put assumptions aside and appreciate what we know naturalistically. Perhaps the most important functional cellular unit in the brain is the neuron. Pretty much all the currently available evidence points to the neuron as being fundamentally important to the development of consciousness. Before diving into the topic, we should have a working definition of consciousness. Would you be on board with accepting something to the tune of it being the awareness that a creature has regarding the internal and external environment of said creature? We could argue the extent of this and how it can be finely developed, but if we an agree that this is a decent working definition, I think we can move foreword with conservation that will be productive on some level.

 

So, it appears that the neuron plays a critical role in producing this awareness and from this awareness, consciousness may arise. Here's the mind blowing and not at all supernatural fact. A human brain contains about 100 billion of these neurons. Think about that; a single brain contains a neuron for every star in our entire galaxy. Then consider the fact that these neurons are connected to one and other. On the average, every neuron is connected to around 10,000 other neurons. This means that a brain will likely contain more than a trillion connections. Finally, we need to add another fact into the mix. Neurons rely on a network of support cells known as glial cells. There are perhaps 10 times as many glial cells as there are neurons and all this stuff is crammed into your head! Also, we are still discovering new types of glial cells, so the naturalistic story is far from being told. In other words, current naturalistic understanding is very limited and profoundly complex without even thinking about the supernatural.

 

If you would like, I could explain in more detail how neurons work and how we could make simple neural systems from limited numbers of neurons but appreciate how rudimentary forms of awareness and consciousness can arise from said systems?

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The one thing that the materialist view can't explain, and that is the "hard problem of concscioussness"--see the link I posted upthread. The problem is not that we can't find correlates of conscioussness in the brain, we can; but correlation is not causation. Neurologists absolutely do not know exactly how consciousness arises at this moment in history. Lest the materialists dogpile this, please note that I am not suggesting a "soul of the gaps".

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What blows me away about consciousness is how non-living matter can, over a great length of time, come together eventually to form a creature which is self aware. In other words, non-living matter eventually became self-aware or conscious through the living creatures that came into existence and evolved from it. Just mind boggling!

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I'm not quite sure what all the hoopla is about.

 

Sorry, but it seems apparent to me that consciousness is a function of higher brain activity. Consciousness has different expressions depending on the organism… a single celled creature though it has no real brain is still somewhat aware of it's surroundings.. a perception of sorts even if very rudimentary…a plant has a sort of consciousness - it can react to the environment and to other plants and animals, an insect may have something a little different… since it needs to perceive and respond to it's environment in more sophisticated ways…. and on it goes… the more complex creatures have more sophisticated levels of awareness… both to the external environment and to the inner environment of the creature. (in humans consciousness seems to be our psyche, the inner translator/interpreter of the kajillions of bits of information our brains [neurons, etc..] fire, file, refile, make connections, and scan constantly to keep us in a state of equilibrium with our inner and outer environment.

 

Social creatures have the most complex consciousness… because reading your fellows is essential in a social construct - and to read your fellows is dependent on being able to empathize, and this is only possible with self-awareness and the ability to think abstractly. (except in the case of social insects - who are more like a community organism - but who is to say that there isn't a sort of communal consciousness going on there? We don't know, and I find it difficult to propose a way to try to measure that.) Language has furthered this in humans.

 

Studying people with brain injuries is quite telling from what I have read. Who we are is definitely linked with the brain… some people can go through a very marked change in personality and awareness with certain kinds of brain injury and even illness.

 

Consciousness. It's evolutionary. It's in the brain. I used to think there was something mystical about it - but I could find no evidence for that. Not yet anyway.

 

But it is a fascinating subject and I hope scientists continue to study it.

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I think anyone doing serious work in the philosophy of mind would agree that consciousness is very much dependent on the brain. If you damage a part of the brain, the person's behavior, perception, and perhaps whole personality will change. However, this, as orbit pointed out is only correlation, and not causation. It may seem parsimonius to just say that this probably means that it is simply brain that causes mind. That does make quite a bit of sense and may very well be true, but it raises a lot of questions and could be a bit of a cop-out.

 

Subjective experience is something that should strike us all as very curious. Nothing about being an organism that is fit to survive and reproduce requires any subjective experience, merely an extremely complex system of instincts that work together to help the organism thrive. You could probably map out the brain and show what parts of the brain are involved in the different things that have traditionally been attributed to the workings of a soul. This is why some people just go for the identity theory: Brain is Mind. This pretty much hand-waves consciousness away as an irrelevent part of the picture. However, consciousness can not be simply cast aside as it is literally is... everything. Everything you have ever experienced has occured in consciousness.

 

Suppose you were born incurably deaf. You study all the physiological correlates of hearing. You learn everything there is to know about the human ear and how hearing works. Yet, you will never know what is really like to hear a sound. Your inner experience, or qualia, is of fundamental importance and should not be considered an afterthought in our understanding of the brain-mind connection.

 

So we are far from understanding what consciousness is. To just wave it off as some kind of emergent property is premature and should not be taken for granted. Does this mean that after our brains die, we can magically float away from our bodies with all our cognitive faculties intact? Almost definitely no. But to say that the brain is all there is to mind is not a given at this point.

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I think anyone doing serious work in the philosophy of mind would agree that consciousness is very much dependent on the brain. If you damage a part of the brain, the person's behavior, perception, and perhaps whole personality will change. However, this, as orbit pointed out is only correlation, and not causation. 

 

I disagree.  That is evidence of causation.  Brain damage happens often enough and neurologists have tracked it well enough that we can be confident that the brain causes the mind.  If we didn't have the brain damage data then we would only have correlation instead of causation.  If brains couldn't be damaged and all we could do was compare different brain shapes to the different intellects then we would have a lot less of the puzzle.

 

 

 

So we are far from understanding what consciousness is. To just wave it off as some kind of emergent property is premature and should not be taken for granted.

 

I don't think emergent property is a wave off or taking it for granted.  It is a fact that our consciousness gives us a huge advantage over organisms with less developed minds or almost no brain at all.  Individual cells have the best survival strategy if they are part of an organism.  The better the organism is at doing its job the better off the cells are that make it up that organism.  And if these organisms have consciousness as sophisticated as a humans the organisms in turn organize into nations.   cells >>> government

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I had discussed this in an old locked thread in the spirituality section, but here's the best argument I've ever found for consciousness as primary: 

 

 

It may turn out that varying levels of awareness exist in every level of matter and material all the way down to the sub-atomic and that the evolution of a central nervous system simply brings awareness existing in nature into greater focus. 

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^^^  That is cool.  Thanks for sharing.

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A book on this subject that I found interesting was "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. Who knows if he's right, but it's an interesting read.

 

 

This is the book that finished religion off for me for good.  I had been raised with the idea that religion/gods/afterlives were invented by people to try to answer the big questions of life, like "Why are we here?," "What's the meaning of life?," and "What happens after we and our loved ones die?"  But I always wondered where the god concept came from, and to me, that book answered it, made it clear, gave it a physical reason (an actual change in the way that human brains worked), and satisfied my questions.  That was the end of agnosticism for me; I am purely atheist now.

 

The Julian Jaynes Society on the web continues Jaynes's discussion, but I most thoroughly enjoyed the book.

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