I have bad news: consciousness resides in the brain

How can one ever possibly feel calm and collected once one knows that this is the case? Help me orient myself with regard to bleak materialism.

>Consciousness "resides" in the brain

[citation needed]

But the brain resides within God, so it's ok

go watch a nsfw rekt thread and look at some dying people and tell me at what point do their souls go up to jesus or what else happens when your body has been literally eviscerated

>Consciousness resides in the brain

Nice extreme views, sir. *Tips fedora in your direction* would you like to go to a richard dawkins seminar with me on the 'morrow and perhaps have sex with my wife?

Enjoy the moment, user.
The conscious you is just a result of millions of years of evolution. Use it, fulfill your dreams and live a life you want to. Because after your brain dies, there's no more "you".

>consciousness resides in the brain

in what way is this either news or controversial?

are there really people who think otherwise? if so where does consciousness reside? in one's intestines?

I am convinced that everything is conscious. I wrote a philosophy based mostly on the dichotomy between consciousness and whatever else exists, and in the end I don't think there actually is anything else.

This isn't to say that I think trees have emotions or something like that, but rather that consciousness, and specifically meaning, as in the experience of meaning, are universal qualities of reality, are actually the substance of reality itself.

Maybe you should actually read some literature on the hard problem of consciousness before you open your mouth on the topic.

Retards that with nothing to dispute with. Also terrified of death of the consciousness.

>the universe dies with you

>humans only have one brain
this is not Veeky Forums and i do not think Veeky Forums has an amateur day if it was.

Poor OP got baited by fancy fMRI neuro-imaging.
The question is: Can he recuperate?

Let's find out.

>consciousness resides in the brain

Great. For this to be true, you only have to open a human cranium, stick your hand into the soggy brain matter and pull out an object you call "consciousness".

The mind and the body are united to make a complete human. This has been known since the days of the Church Fathers. None of this is news.

If anything, it's dualism that was the radical innovation, and I'm happy to see it and that fag Descartes BTFO.

Ever heard of 'emergence', pleb?

not Veeky Forums

so basically you can't answer my questions

where do you think consciousness resides if not in your brain?
actually in your case i'm prepared to believe that your brain doesn't harbour much in the way of anything

That fashionable, semantically void buzzword coined by irrelevant analytic philosophers? Whoa!!! That sure explains it!!! :^)))))))

Ugh. Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain - it does not exist in itself, but is a result of different sections of brain interacting with each other.

What does it change for me?

burnt

The experience of the universe dies with you.

>Implying FMRI's haven't been debunked and aren't completely useless

So god is a skull?

Yeah this.
Mind and body are one, newfag

Whoa!!! Just look at how his "Ugh"--much like a bacon of light--tries to let us, the uneducated, know that whatever follows it is, without a shadow of doubt, the universal consensus, and you'd be an idiot to believe otherwise.

>Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain
>it does not exist in itself, but is a result of different sections of brain interacting with each other.
My sides. And the different sections of my computer, my digestive system, and the Andromeda galaxy interacting means that those interactions are a "consciousness" which is an "emergent property".

>Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain - it does not exist in itself
>Postulate existence of something
>Deny said existence

Okay, you obviously are not qualified to speak on the subject.

Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, on materialism:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours ....

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

....

Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

Why would a basic fact like that cause you any distress? There's nothing "bleak" about your consciousness not being some permanent immortal bullshit.

....

t is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

....

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.

consciousness is not how it is achieved

Are you being obtuse on purpose?

Ah, Chesterton. Such beautiful loquacious bullshit. "I have no actual argument against materialism, but it feels wrong and is therefore insane, limited, and leaves out all the important stuff like these examples that it in no way actually leaves out. Whoops. Better make more gently condescending remarks about the poor blind atheists."

I actually love reading Chesterton, but at the end of the day his arguments are idiotic, undeservedly smug, and involve nothing much beyond condescension towards any non-Xtians. If you want to know how much logic and likelihood means to Chesterton, just read "The Secret Garden," one of his better-known and respected Father Brown stories, and consider the idiotic amount of chance and deus ex machina required for the plan to come off. He makes Lewis look fair and open-minded when it comes to faith, for goodness' sake.

Yeah I pretty much agree with you. But if your materialism is big enough to embrace some mysticism, it's not much of materialism.

As for the Fr. Brown stories, I have read that very one, among others, and agree with you there, too. Chesterton didn't take his own Fr. Brown stories very seriously, they were mostly for fun.

To me, someone who has never liked philosophy much, to say "everything is materially caused and there is nothing outside of matter, but the human mind is an extraordinary epiphenomenon and we can allow for poetry and all of that", and "there is something in ourselves that is non-material, a soul".

And Chesterton is definitely an antidote against the kind of garden-variety morons who say things like

>the purpose of life is to reproduce

Or

>It doesn't matter what you do, we're all gonna die, I'm going to and and and !

Or

>I don't believe I can know anything

Obtuse? Do you not know how the burden of proof works? It's simple: if you ontologically commit to x and somebody calls you out x, it is your duty to justify your position on x. You have yet to provide any evidence to your magical, bollocks.

You claim to profess knowledge on the subject matter yet you flounder like a slippery eel, unable to define "consciousness" without running into semantic absurdities.

I'm not the guy you were arguing with, but I find it ludicrous that you say things like, "Grab consciousness out of someone's brain. You can't? Musn't reside there then," and then have the gall to say other people are engaging in magical thinking.

So you rewrote Schopenhauer's metaphysics?

>Musn't reside there then," and then have the gall to say other people are engaging in magical thinking.
If finding something "ludicrous" would become the golden standard of a good argument we'd be in trouble.

At any rate, you're wrong. You're secretly assuming that I am arguing for a non-physical soul residing God knows where, which just isn't the case.

Define "consciousness".

The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.

you posted the wrong piece of anatomy then

not the one u replied to, but don't animals also have that? i thought it's what made us diff from animals? or is it the ability to think rationally? i'm confused please make me understand

What is "awareness"? Is an atom aware of other atoms because it changes in response to them?

What you say is not impossible. Here's how we got our knowledge of the brain (since it was immoral to conduct experiments ) :

You get a patient. Patient can't perform X function. Autopsy. Patient has damaged X' structure.
Therefore X' corresponds to X.

You might think that this is too simple or stupid, but that's how they did it. And now we know that the cortex is the conscious part of the brain and the subcortex is the subconscious one.
I've studied this shit and can go deeper if you have questions.

What is an AI?

We're just a shitload more intelligent than animals. and we have language.

Knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.

>Knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.
That definition has literally nothing to do with the OP.

How so?

Because the OP uses it as an object and not a property.

Are you talking about or

instead of having them read chesterton, you can just shoot them in the head

it's quicker, and not as painful for them

You need to be a billionaire as far as neurons go in order to be conscious. An atom is not aware because it changes. I am not aware because I change. I am aware because
>something touches me
>touch is converted to electricity (action potential)
>electricity goes to brain
>brain knows body is touched

The same shit for vision, hearing, smell and taste

>We're just a shitload more intelligent than animals. and we have language.
Parrots can talk and some of them are as smart as small children. You can even teach primates sign language and they'll lie to you.

Still. They aren't smarter than us. That guy is saying animals are dumber than people. He isn't saying that they are unconscious. What is your point?

They can reproduce the sounds but they can't "talk". You can train dogs to sit when you tell them to but that doesn't mean they understand language.

>bacon of light

Free Will by Sam Harris, lots of research mentioned there

>Sam Harris

>>brain knows body is touched
It's time to consult and revisit the mereological fallacy, a fallacy committed by hack neuroscientists worldwide.

Okay here's something simpler: you are an irrational spiritualist monkey if you believe this image.

They can talk, they can even lie as I pointed out in the case of primates. Humans have gotten snowed by animals they taught language to who then used it against humans.
>Still. They aren't smarter than us.
They're smarter than some of us, including scientists.

...

>ur irrational
>becuz ur monkey

There are only two modes of answering this question at this point.

Either you side with the epiphenomenalist camp, or the panpsychist camp.

I side with the panpsychist camp personally.

Haven't really read Schopenhauer so that is possible. You're saying he had a similar system?

F A L S E D I L E M M A.

Not really a false dilemma if you're actually up to speed on the discussion.

So you can believe a claim that is literally a paradox, or believe a claim that proposes there are things we still don't know about?

Do you think in your head because that's where your eyes are or because that's where your brain is??

Neither. You think in your ears.

You think in your heart, as all the ancients knew.

Have you ever seen someone with a brain injury? I have, they can still think, though their thoughts may be damaged or altered.

Have you ever seen someone with a heart injury? No, because their thoughts go away, and they are dead.

When you are emotionally aroused do you feel it in your brain?

No, idiot, you feel it in your breast.

Judging by the beginning of his World as will and idea I've pdfed here I don't think it is the same. He is making some kind of subject-object dichotomy. Does he later collapse it into a homogeneous reality?

Not sure what you mean about this post.

Can you elaborate? What do you mean about a "paradox"?

wow

Are you perchance someone with a brain injury?

>Have you ever seen someone with a heart injury? No, because their thoughts go away, and they are dead.
I like the point but plenty of people do have heart attacks and similar and are not cold and dead.

You're oversimplifying tho. It's generally easier (as in more right) to say behaviour x' is caused by change in area x. But change in area x doesn't necessarilly entail behaviour x'.

>The defining aspect of human perception is that they see being as something that is singular in nature
>The most common view of being involves it being unique to each person
???

You can't account for the structural characteristics of language, though. So who cares.

We're all humans but we're not the same human.

Koch (of Crick and Koch buddy neuroscientist fame) has a similar conception btw.

As for subject-object dichotomy, he's responding to Kant. Kant you may be aware had this idea of the thing in itself that sends out these phenomena that become sense perceptions and we transform it through imagination into the world around us. To put it in very broad terms, Schopenhauer thinks we do have access to the thing in itself because we are thing in itself. So there is no real subject object dichotomy, we are all one and same.

The latter view is a paradox because it implies some information cannot be communicated.

The sad part is, we all know that everyone would use these, even knowing the risks.

That said, of course you don't die. We're already dead.

Private language argument m8. Some stuff can't be communicated.

>. Kant you may be aware had this idea of the thing in itself that sends out these phenomena that become sense perceptions and we transform it through imagination into the world around us
Yeah this always bothered me about Kant, though I've always found his writing extremely soothing for some reason, something to do with the absolutely precise and calm nature of it I think.


As for Schopenhauer, he mentions that you have to read his entire book at least twice to understand what he's saying. So he must be saying something much more sophisticated than what i'm thinking of which is expressible in like two sentences.

Would you mind telling me what his definition of 'will' is in contrast to the 'idea', I would read it myself but he is taking an unearthly amount of time to get to actually saying anything

That isn't bad news, m8. It's just another piece of evidence supporting determinism, so nothing new.

This.

I don't see how it does but even then language has limitations.

In a physical sense, like the transfer of heat. The implication that there exist properties that cannot be measured.

>Would you mind telling me what his definition of 'will' is in contrast to the 'idea', I would read it myself but he is taking an unearthly amount of time to get to actually saying anything
World as Will is what I've just described above, reality is a Will that we and everything else are aspects of. Ideas are to do with how we see the world and how come we perceive ourselves as separate to a rock or a tree from the ground etc etc which is the world as respresentation. You could also say Will is more to do with active drive and Idea is passive interpretation or something to that effect.

You should read the book since this is all gross oversimplification. I believe you'll find it helpful in reading tho.

Are you saying information isn't physical?

No, I'm saying that the common perception of the mind implies that minds cannot be measured.

>World as Will is what I've just described above, reality is a Will that we and everything else are aspects of. Ideas are to do with how we see the world and how come we perceive ourselves as separate to a rock or a tree from the ground etc etc which is the world as respresentation
Actually yes I think I would read the book, that is very close to what I came to think like. I understood it less like 'reflection' and more that our conscious selves were like little strands of the 'will', that have been separated, but that can merge with it in various ways. Which is the same idea really as the reflection thing, it is like you interpret reality as these different forms because you are this localized segment of it which colors your possible perception of it.

Like if you had a huge stream that was initially all together and then it started separating into different paths which merge with each other in complex ways.

I'll have to set aside some time to read it I suppose, it's going to take forever with the way he writes.

Depends on what you mean by measuring. Technically it's possible to record brain activity then reproduce it in another person's brain.

>Technically it's possible to record brain activity then reproduce it in another person's brain.
Our brains are not consistent like some protostomes Michio Kaku. We all have very plastic neurons.

Then how come brain scans are consistent for most people? If that were the case to such a degree surely the entire field of neuroscience would go bust.

holy shit

They're pretty consistent for individuals. But even where they're fairly consistent across a group of people (that they're not is the basis of most research so no it does the opposite of of going bust) that doesn't then mean you can tickle the neurons so that person A feels exactly like person B. On a neuron level the brains would be way too different.

Your last comma should have been a semi colon.

The point is that the will is uniform throughout everything, but that a human's senses only measure it within a limited space i.e. their own body. It's a solution for the problem of other minds that uses a more primal term.

Literally this.

Also if you sickly bunch knew anything about the procedure and criteria of science, we wouldn't get this place clogged up with realists.
Nobody has proven consciousness to be anything within the scientific community.