Is there any evidence or real possibility for consciouness being independant in anyway from the brain?

Religionfags aren't the only ones who question physicalist reductionism. I've never been religious, but I think that the hard problem of consciousness is legit.

I honestly don't understand how it's that hard of a problem to be honest. Everything you perceive is just a representation of input from the outside. Why wouldn't we perceive things we experience in our brains? We see the color blue as blue because our brains need there to be something there to represent that color to us. Otherwise we would just be automatons reacting to physical input, but never thinking or conceptualizing and doing those things is of course evolutionarily far more advantageous to do.
I don't see how the hard problem cannot be explained in a materialist way, more like the hard non-problem

Not evidence exactly, but more of a logical conclusion.

Authority of science (and justification) requires evidence to be peer-reviewed by constituents of a scientific community. There is always a bias. For example, a panel of liberal scientists might agree 100% on something, even if it seems valid to them; though, you may have to have some skepticism if this were a topic that could pose liberal dissenting opinion. Add a couple conservatives to the panel; if the view changes, then try to understand their side.
A doctor, for example, is only as good as the institution that has made him; and if you would rather see a doctor from your country, than a doctor from a third world country, then it's justified .

Point is, to state a fact, we need authority, evidence and justification.

You perceive the world through your eyes, not through a stone, or a tree, or through the billions of other living animals. You could say "luck" put you in the position you are.
Billions of years happened before you were born, and it's likely that quadrillions of years will occur after your death until the end of the universe (if it ends at all). But what is certain, is that you were born, and you died. And while you slept, you went in and out of consciousness, sometimes waking up as if only a few moments had passed, when an entire night had gone by. Your existence itself can't perceive non-existence. If you cease to exist, so will everything else, because you are the authority on what is real. You will always exist, maybe not with the same memories, but the essence of existence and observation will still exist.

>I don't see how the hard problem cannot be explained in a materialist way
Try to do it, then. Give me a physical mechanism by which matter arranged in a certain way gives rise to subjective experience.

walk in the woods and get eaten by a bear and see how independent you are from your body

>We see the color blue as blue because our brains need there to be something there to represent that color to us.
You just did it yourself.

I ain't no scientist, but generally I would say something like:
Input gets thrown into brain through sensory organs, brain interpets those signals and assigns experience to them based on what it thinks it is perceiving. something like that?

What?

>Religious people tend to complain about unbelievers being nihilists

I've never ever heard a religious person say this.

From this post I can tell you don't understand what the hard problem of consciousness IS. Like, at all. I'm not trying to insult you or belittle you but you really should read more about this before you post about it.

Nope, we're just a slave of our brain

>Your existence itself can't perceive non-existence. If you cease to exist, so will everything else, because you are the authority on what is real.
Ok but how does that equal "consciousness is independent from the brain"? The essence of existence and observation for your particular cognitive universe die with you.

I'll admit I'm having a hard time conceptualizing it. But isn't it like "why do we experience things subjectively?" As in: when you experience pain, why does your consciousness experience a non-physical sensation or imagination of pain and not just a physical reaction to hostile stimuli, am I close? Help me understand user

Not him but basically, yes. Why is there such a thing as subjective experience, and how is it related with the physical world? After all, I can imagine a being with human-level intelligence/problem-solving ability, but no consciousness, no subjective experience - for example, a hyper-intelligent but not conscious computer. But we are not beings of such a nature - we feel things, we have interior experience. I'll borrow from Thomas Nagel -- there is something that it is like to be a human. Presumably, there is not something that it is like to be a computer. I can imagine building a super-intelligent computer that can solve problems at a human level of ability or even greater. Would it automatically develop interior experience, consciousness, once it became intelligent enough in the problem-solving sense? There's no reason to think it would. But if it did, by what mechanism would that happen? And by what mechanism, if you think that there is a mechanism, does it happen in humans? Is there a mechanism?
Now, clearly physical changes can impact consciousness. If I get hit on the head a certain way, it can cause me to lose consciousness. So there is some connection. But is it a connection which has a mechanism that science can uncover, or is it something fundamentally different? That's part of the mystery.

That's it, yeah. So maybe you do understand it after all. But then if you think about it you should be able to see that your explanation in isn't actually any kind of answer to the problem or the user's question.

Yeah, the brain receives electrical and chemical signals and then processes them, that's how cognition works, obviously the user you're replying to knows that. But the issue is how that gives rise to subjective phenomena, when there's no reason that cognition has to entail subjective phenomena - human beings would be just as functional if we were philosophical zombies. That's literally the definition of a philosophical zombie, it's functionally equivalent to a normal human being. Much more importantly, there's no obvious mechanism by which that (cognition giving rise to subjective experiences) would happen that's accounted for in our current understanding of physics or neuroscience.

Saying that the brain "assigns experiences" to us is a non-answer when the question is "HOW does the brain 'assign experiences' to us?" It would be like responding to "How does an engine make the car move?" by saying "Well, it makes the wheels turn." Which is certainly true ... but it's not really what I was asking.

Good comment IMO, just want to address one small matter...
>It would be like responding to "How does an engine make the car move?" by saying "Well, it makes the wheels turn." Which is certainly true ... but it's not really what I was asking.
I don't think this comparison actually makes sense. With the engine and the wheels and the car moving, you actually can explain the physical mechanism (at least, until/unless you dig down to the fundamental level of "why are there mathematically predictable physical forces" and so on), so it's different from the relationship of matter & consciousness.

>Why is there such a thing as subjective experience?
that seems like a non-issue to me tho. We experience because, evolutionarily it is better to experience than to not experience. You can be a hyper intelligent creature, but it is probably more effective to have some sort of channel that your brain can interpret information through, or recall a specific sensation in it's memory by. A creature which experiences can make more sense of the world and plan accordingly to this sense than a creature that just reacts to outward stimuli.
>if you think that there is a mechanism, does it happen in humans? Is there a mechanism?
I can't say for sure of course, but I would say the mechanism is an accumulation of all the processes happening in our brains simultaneously.

I see, let me try to explain myself better
The mechanism for experience is the entirety of the brain. It is simply the best way for an organism to interpret information and so that is what happened. As to how exactly it happens I am not sure of course, but I think it's fair to say it is the result of many many processes and calculation happening simultaneously in your brain and your brain trying to streamline a constant flow of interpretation in some kind of effective manner, instead of just doing nothing nothing it has to conceptualize in some way
>human beings would be just as functional if we were philosophical zombies.
Would we though? You say that as if it was a given, as if there's no evolutionary benefit to subjective experience. Without an interpreter or "experiencer" for the sensations we feel I think humans would have a lot harder time surviving in nature to be honest. Because there if there is no experience, there is no channel for humans to think through, a non-experiencing automaton, might be able to do some shit, but he can probably not interoperate things as effectively as an experiencing human can
Does that make sense?

>it was
>evolution
>evolution
>evolution
>and i have no evidence and don't know
pathetic

Do you think if you showed an engine to a broze age peasant he would be able to explain the physical mechanism behind it? Or would he say it's magical?
Just because we don't know the specific mechanisms for consciousness yet (because the human brain is the most complex thing we have found in the universe so far) doesn't mean there is no physical explanation behind it noh?

Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy at all, but I wanted to include an analogy and honestly don't know if I could think of a better one even if I thought for like half an hour. There really are no great analogies here since this issue has no analogue in the physical world at all (which when you think about it is kind of the root of the problem).

What I was trying to get across is that it answers the question by ... rephrasing the question, basically. Whether intentional or unintentional, it's a dodge.
>How does an engine make the car move?
>Well, it makes the wheels turn.
Even though I didn't refer to the wheels in my question, obviously I know the engine makes the wheels turn. What I was really asking, albeit in a simpler form, is HOW it makes the wheels turn. What is the relationship between burning gasoline and turning the wheels?

>Why do we have subjective experiences?
>Well, the brain receives electrical signals and assigns experiences to them.
Sure, but HOW does it do that? etc etc

Like I said, it's not a perfect analogy, but that is what I was trying to get across.

Wow thanks for the amazing response user, you sure showed me.
Jesus christ you faggot, I'm just spitballing here. If you don't have anything to say, just fuck off

>and i have no evidence and don't know
Oh and you do? please show me your evidence for your theory of where experience arises from thank you

Materialist theories of mind have just as much trouble as dualist ones.

>please show me your evidence
I have seen a soul, i've seen every soul, and they all look the same. Without one, the people who walk around this earth in shoes and cars aren't even human. They're dolls.

Got ya. Yeah, I figured that you were probably aiming at that, just wanted to clarify.
>There really are no great analogies here since this issue has no analogue in the physical world at all (which when you think about it is kind of the root of the problem).
Precisely.

>I have seen a soul, i've seen every soul
Oh, oh I'm sorry user. I was under the impression that you weren't a crazy person, how foolish of me to think such a thing.

The fact that you think that constitutes evidence, my god you must be so far gone my friend. Well good luck to you, say hi to the fairies and ghosts next time you go out searching for the metaphysical.
And maybe take a picture or something this time so you don't look like a drooling moron

I'll probably write you a longer response in a few min - have to step away briefly - but real quick I want to hit this:
>Because there if there is no experience, there is no channel for humans to think through, a non-experiencing automaton, might be able to do some shit, but he can probably not interoperate things as effectively as an experiencing human can
Again I'm not trying to insult you, but I'm not sure you quite get what a philosophical zombie is. Which makes sense, it's not like our language is particularly good at communicating this shit.

The point of a philosophical zombie is that it behaves IDENTICALLY to a human with subjective experiences. It would be utterly indistinguishable from one, except on the inside. A philosophical zombie would be just as capable of thinking and emoting, just as capable of anger, grief, genius, humor, creativity, stupidity, nostalgia and so on as a normal human. The only difference would be that unlike us it would not have the subjective experience of any of these phenomena. It's thinking through the same channels as we do, it just has no awareness of its thoughts. It's archiving memories in the same way we do. When it stubs its toe and gets annoyed, the pain receptors fire in the same way yours do, the amygdala floods its body with the same "I'm angry now" hormones as yours does, it yells "Fuck" in the same tone of voice as you do. The only difference is that you actually have the subjective experience of pain, anger, etc, whereas it has no subjective experience whatsoever. But you react the exact same way, both on the inside AND the outside.

So maybe - I'm just spitballing here - maybe that whole idea seems absurd to you, you don't think a being like that could exist. But you're just bumping up against the hard problem of consciousness again, rephrased in a different way - the question becomes "Why not?"

Are you saying that I hallucinated it? Are you a doctor?
>evidence
how is someone's primary document of an event not a record of something or evidence? Maybe you should stare into a microscope for the rest of your life and wonder how many centimeters something is.

>but I'm not sure you quite get what a philosophical zombie is.
Oh I do, but you're right on the money here:
>maybe that whole idea seems absurd to you, you don't think a being like that could exist
I think an experiencer is necessary for an organism like a human to arise, at least through evolution. We could probably make a machine with as good cognition as ours without the experiencing part, but that would be an entirely different process and outcome than what humans went through to get where we are. It would be a very different kind of intelligence than we have, designed for a different function as well.

>Are you saying that I hallucinated it?
Yes probably or you misinterpreted some event happening to you or constructed some kind of false memory. The human perception is completely biased and there's all kinds of people walking around thinking they got abducted by aliens or saw ghosts or crazy shit like that.

>how is someone's primary document of an event not a record of something or evidence?
Uhh in every way? It's anecdotal evidence, muddied by human bias, completely disregardable

>are you a doctor?
I don't need to be
>Maybe you should stare into a microscope for the rest of your life and wonder how many centimeters something is.
what a silly insult

>Because there if there is no experience, there is no channel for humans to think through, a non-experiencing automaton, might be able to do some shit, but he can probably not interoperate things as effectively as an experiencing human can
So then the question becomes ... why? Why couldn't all of our ancestors have been philosophical zombies, going right back to whichever primitive life form was the first one to have subjective experiences? Obviously they weren't - but why not? And why isn't it possible to have OUR kind of intelligence without subjective experiences?

Souls are by definition real, but the concept of soul is corrupted by the English language. English's word for soul carries a similar weight to words such as spirit, and thus has a rather incorporeal meaning. However, the soul is really just the 'life-principle', the thing which differs a living thing from a materially identical non-living thing.

Aristotle defines the soul as 'the primary act of a living organic organism', and that seems to me like a rather sharp definition. Whether the soul has any extra-organic powers is a different question, but if you define the soul as Aristotle did, it unquestionably exists.

It's like asking why flowers generally grow their structures around the Fibonacci sequence. Because that is just the most efficient and effective way to for their growth to serve their survival.
>going right back to whichever primitive life form was the first one to have subjective experiences?
It's a gradual thing, there is no definitive first one.

>And why isn't it possible to have OUR kind of intelligence without subjective experiences?

Because our intelligence serves a very specific function to our survival and so subjective experience serves a specific purpose to our survival as well. It's simply easier for an organism to function if it can experience than if it cannot experience. You can make up hypothetical scenarios about philosophical zombies, but those don't exist in real life, at least not on the higher level of the intelligence scale.

No offense, but your argument is essentially "it's evolution, I don't habe to explain anything". Its very convenient to just say "it's this way because it's the evolutionarily beneficial", but that's all it is. Don't you think that saying such a thing is merely a bias of subjective experience?

If you argue that we are totally ruled by the material, then we are philosophical zombies. "We" are just a hairless primate experiencing a voice in our heads wee think is our own, but our thoughts are really just a by-product of biology and not necessarily indicative of any actual experience by a "self". In a wholly material system, we must ask what "subjective experience" would even mean.

Being the decoherence of language and logic into play and you cam begin to see the utter failure of materialism to hold up in a postmodern framework, which you can only deflect from if you choose to ignore philosophical development over the last hundred years.

>that is just the most efficient and effective way to for their growth to serve their survival.
>subjective experience serves a specific purpose to our survival as well
>It's simply easier for an organism to function if it can experience than if it cannot experience
I'm sorry, dude, but you haven't actually backed this up in any way at all - just restated it several times.

All of that's a sideshow, though, frankly, because even if we accept for the sake of argument that having subjective experiences helps organisms survive, it still sidesteps the basic question: how do purely physical objects and processes give rise to experiential phenomena?

>it's evolution, I don't habe to explain anything
Evolution is the explanation tho, what more is there to explain? You asked how I said it's a process of our entire brain, you asked why I said because it's evolutionarily more beneficial to process information that way, because it's just easier for an organism to interpret information if it has a subjective experience. Anything else dives into the realm of the supernatural. Like,I don't know the specific mechanism and processes, I'm not a biologist or an evolutionary expert, but from what I know about it that seems like the most logical materialist explanation to me.

I think thinking consciousness is somehow different than the rest of the universe is probably the more biased viewpoint.

>If you argue that we are totally ruled by the material, then we are philosophical zombies. "We" are just a hairless primate experiencing a voice in our heads wee think is our own, but our thoughts are really just a by-product of biology and not necessarily indicative of any actual experience by a "self". In a wholly material system, we must ask what "subjective experience" would even mean.
That seems about right to me, that's why I think the hard problem of Consciousness is really a non-problem.

>Being the decoherence of language and logic into play and you cam begin to see the utter failure of materialism to hold up in a postmodern framework
How so?

Well it's hard to explain and I can't prove it of course, since our knowledge is too limited in these subjects. Try to imagine a brain, receiving input, but no one there to experience that input, reaction to stimuli still happens, but since there is no experiencer to make sense of or visualize what is happening the brain is not as effective at interpreting those signals it receives as a brain with an experiencer is, because it has no central catalyst to structure it's perception through, it has no identity around which it can structure it's perception

Oh and as far as this goes:
>it still sidesteps the basic question: how do purely physical objects and processes give rise to experiential phenomena?
We don't know yet, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a materialist explanation for it.
If I had to guess I would say that it's a very very complicated process that results from the massive interconnection of neuron pathways and structures in our brain. It's probably one of the most hard to understand things we'll ever discover, but that doesn't mean it can't be done

My argument would be that consciousness isn't different, just that it is fundamental. Consciousness is the ability to project, to have more than the physical now in play. It's being able to look back and see where you were, look around and see where you are, look forward and see where you could go. Seeing where you could have been and what could have been.

And understanding decoherence, it's not hard to make the assertion that Absolute states cannot be said to exist. We cannot know where something has been, where it is, where it will be or could have been, with absolute certainty -- I don't think We cam make an argument for absolute state collapse. We cannot make any absolute arguments with logical standing given the decohered relativism of logic, and taken to the material this should mean that something is always more than it "appears" to be due to the subjectivity of not just experience but of reality as a construct of society, of the mind, etc.

Anvd the reason I bring this up is simply that, within a materialist system, this is the end point. Decoherence. You can say "a material answer can be found", but within a postmodern and materialist frame we can never arrive at such an answer authentically. If you go full materialism, I think one must accept the ideologies of postmodern materialism. Otherwise you're just an empiricist with hushed monads at work.

There is no reason to assume cognition could occur if not through subjective phenomena. P-zombies aren't a coherent idea. Even a computer can't "see" an object unless there is an internal representation of whatever info the camera captures. The problem of language here is that it allows you to construe your mental states as separate from your brain states, when there is no real evidence for why it would be (hypothetical automatons aren't evidence for anything except for our ability to come up with impossibilities and nonsense like things-that-are-not-themselves).

>My argument would be that consciousness isn't different, just that it is fundamental
Fundamental to what? Being a human? I agree.
If you mean fundamental to the universe, then maybe, but only in the way that I think basically everything is fundamental to the universe, otherwise it wouldn't exist.
> Consciousness is the ability to project, to have more than the physical now in play. It's being able to look back and see where you were, look around and see where you are, look forward and see where you could go. Seeing where you could have been and what could have been.
Which evolutionarily is an incredibly advantageous thing to be able to do, but it basically only works if there is an experiencer at the centre of it, around which you can construct these projections, which seems to be the way things went.

So if I've got this right, you're saying because of decoherence nothing is absolute or unchanging and because of our subjective realisation of reality through our minds and by proxy through society that wouldn't allow us to find the true answers to the nature of things because not only our inner universe but the very nature of the universe itself is relative?
So you mean that within the materialist viewpoint, because everything is supposedly relative to the observer we can never have a true unbiased, authentic answer to where consciousness comes from, right? And so: if you are a materialist, you have to be a post modernist as well?
I think I can agree with that. I would say that there is no way to get to the answers "authentically" we can only approximate from our subjective viewpoint and reach a consensus between ourselves. I think that's basically all we can ask for to be honest.

Ah yes, but then if we unshackle ourselves from absolutism, then we can have real ideological fun. The real argument against metaphysics is that the empirical is more valid for it better reflects reality, but if we take decoherence to heart the ultimate arbiter is, as you said, consensus amongst ourselves.

At that point, I would say we should entertain ideas like panpsychism not as truth, but to see what happens, and see in what ways it correlates with empiricism. To take different view points, understand the relativism, and poke at the reality beyond our subjective human perception. Materialism is but one way for the blind man to feel at the elephant.

Basically, I think your argument is entirely valid and logical. The point o would bring up is merely that evolution gives "an" answer, not "the" answer. As such, consciousness can and should be approached openly from many angles. Not to seek truth, but understanding rather. This is the use of metaphysics, idealism, rationalism, etc.

The postmodern idea of "play" really needs to come back. That's ultimately all we can do with consciousness, play around with it and the idea of it, but I'm doing so I'd think it necessitates stepping back from any one philosophical system as an end all be all

kek.

Well OP, you're basically asking if consciousness is an emergent phenomenon or not, otherwise being a collection of programmed states.
In the link below, there are ample real-world descriptions of emergent phenomena classified as so-called 'Quasiparticles' which effectively are particles that exist under specific solid-state media.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle

I believe it a reasonable postulate that a conscious body of matter has analogues that would act as 'conscience' quasiparticles that obey some as yet undeducted transformation algebra on some domain. Thus, consciousness would be contained strictly in the information of our brains, yet inseparable from its material architecture which also provides the correct format for the information. Perhaps future technological development would be able to tease out consciousness from one mind and transport it faithfully to a new synthetic mind that provides the structure necessary for continued function and feeling of experience and awareness.

That's a very interesting perspective user, I think I basically agree with it and I think that people (myself included) do put too much value into materialism as the definitive be all end all way to look at the universe, even though it's still just a philosophical framework and therefor not completely unbiased.

I do think materialism is probably the best way to explain things rationally and verifiably that we have found so far, but it is not completely impenetrable from a philosophical point of view and there definitely could be more to consciousness that is worth considering through other philosophical systems. But the problem is that things quickly turn into wild speculation, without some kind of verifiability like the kind that materialism brings.

I think being open to other philosophical schools of thought, while keeping materialism in the back of your mind is probably the best way to go about it. It's easy to be very dismissive as a materialist though, which is something I struggle with myself.

Does a computer's internal representation correspond to any sort of subjective experience?
>The problem of language here is that it allows you to construe your mental states as separate from your brain states
Brain states can be described in terms of arrangements of matter. To be precisely, brain matter. But the taste of ice cream, the pain of stubbing a toe, the joy of coming to an insight... look nothing like brain matter. In this case language describes correctly when it differentiates between the two.