How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?

How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?

How is it that at some point in our evolutionary history some unconscious biological machine developed a "subjective experience"? If we hone in on the very instant of the birth of consciousness, we may suppose that some event – perhaps a mutation and the subsequent development of a slightly different brain – resulted in some new organization of atoms, which were sufficient to produce consciousness.

But what could it be about this new configuration of atoms that made it sufficiently different to the configuration of atoms just prior? How could such a minuscule change to the arrangement of unconscious matter "switch on the lights" and give rise to subjective experience?

You might say that consciousness is non-binary and even worms and bacteria are conscious to some degree. But why stop there? Why not viruses? Self replicating DNA molecules? Atoms? And if atoms are "conscious", how could they possibly combine to produce more complicated "mental states"?

I just don't get it.

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The problem is, friend, is that there is such a thing as the burden of proof. We don't understand consciousness, yet, but every shred of evidence we do have is that it comes from the brain.

If you are proposing something else you need to say what and provide suitable evidence, not simply ask lots of questions and nitpick.

Literally the same exact shit was said about memories. It's obviously a physical-tied property.

Do atoms not 'behave'? Do they not react to their situation? All things in the universe have rules, and as such act accordingly. Those rules just get a little complicated with enough dimension.

It's all a spectrum, who only privilege the human brain because we ourselves are human and happen to have the most sophisticated brains on earth so we consider ourselves special. But take even a human with inoperable brain tumors and now the degree of consciousness is apparent. Besides, compared to some galactic space hypersquid with a massive genius brain, you yourself are barely considered conscious.

He didn't ask IF mental states are properties of the brain, but how.

Which is the most interesting question there is.

Perhaps he isn't proposing something else and is merely curious

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain in a similar way to how life is an emergent property of unliving chemicals

What do you mean

>How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?

Are you stupid or something? How could it not?

>"subjective experience"

How do you know you have "subjective experience?" I'll tell you how: your brain makes you believe you did. And there's absolutely nothing magical about your brain making you believe something. We need a way to refer to sensory inputs as though it were an object itself so that we can easily build ideas around them and communicate about them to other people. That's why our brains make us believe we have qualia that aren't really there. It's the same principle behind the abstractions of money or numbers. Neither money nor numbers exist in the way physical objects like rocks or water do, but we can deal with these imaginary things as though they were real and it's really beneficial to do that.

explain how it works then

several nobel prizes waiting for you

>several nobel prizes waiting for you

Not him, but no. You and many others are assuming there's some magical secret yet to be discovered about the brain and consciousness. There isn't. As time goes by more mundane details will be documented and more vague associations between brain activity and processes will be identified. That's it. People expecting more are going to hold back the progress of AI in a bad way because you'll literally never believe anything that gets built will actually "count."

What galactic entity are you talking about?

Nobody gets it, user. Alot of people think/say they do though

Any hypothetical species that has a more sophisticated brain than modern humans.
It's to illustrate our concept of "conciousnes" is a reflection of our own brain, if we found a species that was more intelligent than us we'd be forced to examine our own position on the spectrum instead of assuming a special place.

Most people both itt and elsewhere believe in some sort of identity theory or physicalism. Again, the question is HOW.

Or you could just dismiss one of the most heavily researched questions by philosophers and scientists

>most people both itt and elsewhere believe in some sort of identity theory or physicalism
Oh boy. You truly underestimate the stupidity of people.

We'll obviously I'm not saying most people know or are even familiar with those terms. But you don't think most people would give a physicalist/materialist flavoured answer to the problem of consciousness?

>How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?

IT COULD NOT.

observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics. Physicists have found that even passive observation of quantum phenomena (i.e. observations that do not directly act upon the phenomena), can actually change the phenomena; the 1998 Weizmann experiment is a particularly famous example.[1] These findings have led that the conscious mind can actually affect reality

bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics

It is apparently

90% of neuroscientists agree. They must be right.
What about the other 10%? Forget them.

Senses, memory, etc are all electrical impulses. You're never living in the present just experiencing what happened. As every second progresses how do you know that everything before wasn't a manufactured memory? You really could be living in some matrix esque shit

intelligence is easily explicable with physics. qualia not so much.

don't treat them as the same thing.

Burden of proof arguments favor Solopsism. There's literally no evidence humans have concious experiences, and so no way there's any evidence it's related to the brain.

In that case the only applicable answer is that we aren't sure yet and we won't have any definitive answers for quite some time yet as the brain is a very complex organ and there is still much about it we don't yet fully understand.

>No evidence of consciousness.
>Requires consciousness to perceive what is said.
Sure thing pal.

NO.

Explain yourself sandboy

Observer can be a single photon you dumbfuck. It does not refer to a conscious observer.

I certainly do think it's physically explained, but nope. Lurk more. You'll be amazed at the mental gymnastics.

Meant for

The energy states are affected by instruments you stupid fuck. The double slit experiment isn't some guy sitting in a chair and watching electrons pass through slits.

Oh, I've got consciousness. I've just not seen any evidence you guys do.

Consciousness isn't an emergent property of the brain. It's an emergent property of language. Every animal is conscious to the degree that they treat themselves as beings of agency. A dog might not have moral agency but that is simply because it can not rationalize through language. When we say that we are sapient what we really mean is that we can use language in order to describe experience. Qualia seems to be in no way exclusive to human beings.

What seems clear to me is that we are in fact not conscious; not in the colloquial sense of the word anyway. Unrestricted mental linguistical agency is an impossibility if you do not belive in the existence of something akin to the soul. Some other user said it earlier but the belief that our mental faculties are not bound to the same forces which dictate any kind of causal relationship we observe in the universe, is at this time, only holding us back.

How do you know you have consciousness?

>mental states
>qualia
>sense data
>representation

Conceptual traps, all.

How so user?

>How could consciousness be an emergent property of the brain?
It couldn't. Not in any way that's consistent with a materialist understanding of the universe, anyway. There's a reason they call the hard problem of consciousness ... you know, fucking HARD.

Nothing will stop people from tying themselves into philosophical knots to avoid admitting this, though.

Who's to say animals aren't all conscious in the way you describe, just remarkably stupid or alien by comparison?