What are your opinions on the relationship between brain activity and awareness? Like...

What are your opinions on the relationship between brain activity and awareness? Like, is there some missing link between the electrical/chemical processes in the brain and the resulting subjective experience, or is that just considered an "emergent property" that doesn't require further explanation?

Not sure if this is a Veeky Forums question since I don't post here, but it seemed a bit too science-y for Veeky Forums.

I made this reply before and I'll do it again.


The hard problem of consciousness is that we don't have a physical explanation for the subjective phenomena of consciousness. Consciousness is a streaming event while the brain is an organization of discrete and disjointed events(neurochemical reactions). Consciousness is not only a unity but a substantial unity, because we retain our identity even through experiences of unconsciousness(we go to sleep at night and wake up as the same entity the next day). The information structure in the brain is insufficient to properly explain the substantialy unity of consciousness. The events in the brain are more akin to bouncing billiard balls against one another in a chain reaction as they are connected but only in a one-to-one relationship and lack a relationship with the whole in a continuous manner.
There is also the phenomena of the electromagnetic field which hypothetically could connect all of these events. However, we run into a similar problem because the electromagnetic field is quantized as discrete entities, electromagnetic waves. How is one part(current of electromagnetic force) informed of all other parts? It isn't. We run into a conundrum where our current understanding of science can not produce a physical system which adequately explains the phenomena of consciousness.

However, we can use the flaws of the brain(and EMF) argument to produce what we should expect from a physical system that explains consciousness. Consciousness is a self-refrential knowing, that is to say, you know that you know. Much like how computers know certain programs or are informed of them, your consciousness is a process that is informed of its own informational processing. This informational processing is integrated harmoniously. Looking at it from a reductionist stand point, a single act of knowing is informed by a congolmeration of knowing, and simultaneously informs a congolomeration of knowing of itself.

This process is also physically unified through a substratum.
Investigating this substratum produces a knowable physical system that explains consciousness. Trying to use current known phenomena, we can try to invent a new phenomena which possesses the qualities we are looking for. It could be a super-imposed wave of quantumwaves which are all entangled non-locally (as posited by Karl Pribram) or could be a sublte-energy field which unifies all of the electromagnetic waves into a seamless whole, possessing the integrated informational processing we have come to expect. Finally, we can use another new phenomena, which we will call the soul. The soul would be a monad(simple physical unit) with an abstract nature of awareness much like how electrons have the abstract nature of a negative charge.

When we come to a crossroad of hypothesises, we often turn to Occam's razor. Normally we try to use old phenomena to explain new phenomena but as the phenomena we are analyzing are all new physical phenomena, occam's razor doesn't help much yet. Then we try to use the most simple and elegant explanation and in my opinion that would be the soul. I think it is a simpler structure (but would require another mental monad to connect it to the brain), and it is certainly the most elegant which fits the greater design of the universe.
What is the purpose of the brain then? The brain could be a manner of empowering the soul with energy.

That is why I believe in the soul.

>That is why I believe in the soul.

I sure am glad i read that line before disregarding all that block of text.

you are wrong.

nice counter-argument.

I suppose you think the brain produces consciousness via chemical reactions.

Why are these chemical reactions special?
What imbues them with consciousness?
What aren't fires self-aware?

I've produced a physical model for consciousness IE solved the hard problem of consciousness and all you do is scoff.
Einstein never had it this hard.

>Why are these chemical reactions special?
They're not special.
>What imbues them with consciousness?
The reactions themselves imbue us humans with consciousness.
>Why aren't fires self-ware?
They lack the wetware we humans have which produces consciousness.


Your solution is: "Consciousness is magic"
Which is not a real solution in the current science climate and is scoffed at by many a philosopher who demand real answers.

>I suppose you think the brain produces consciousness via chemical reactions.

Yes... well the patterns of neural activity.

Why are these chemical reactions special? They aren't.

>What imbues them with consciousness?

Consciousness is an emergent product of these interactions/patterns of activity. Consciousness is simply awareness. It is a product of the brain processing perceptual information hierarchically and in increasingly abstract ways.

>What aren't fires self-aware?

Fires lack information processing structures that can process sensory input from the environment and its self.

what?

You've entirely missed the hard problem of consciousness.
That is not an adequate explanation.
What makes the wetware cause consciousness? What pattern of firing produces awareness and even self-awareness?

The thing I don't understand, though, is how the processing of information leads to experience. In the common understanding, computers, for example, aren't thought to have any form of experience (although really of course it's impossible to "know" whether anyone but you yourself is conscious).

What is it about the physical differences between the structures of a computer and a brain (human or animal, if we assume animals have subjective experience) that creates such a qualitative difference?

I'm not the guy you're replying to btw, just confused about the link between information and experience.

The machinery doesn't add up.
Neurons are disjointed and consciousness is whole. It's an exercise in futility to claim that the brain produces awareness.
They are simply correlated strongly. ( A change in one will produce a change in the other)

Consciousness is not always streaming. Further, streaming has no bearing on it being continuous or discrete. It is periodically persistent. You leave so many assumptions and gaps in your reasoning, so I'm not going to respond further except that you are doing a lot of gymnastics to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

I don't have answers. I only have ideas on what the answers may be, as we lack the knowledge, at this point, to produce the answer.

You can tell me that I might be wrong, but it hasn't been tested yet, so you cannot know. I reject your idea of the soul, because it clashes with my view of objective science.


We're not even close to explaining qualia, but I believe them to be produced by the brain in some way.

I'm just extrapolating the hard problem of consciousness that is well known to philosophers.
How do we reconcile what we know with the observation of the self?
While awareness is active, the self IS a continuum of experience.
And when we go to sleep it becomes inactive, only to return a short while later which implies there is an underlying physical substratum to consciousness..

The self is not a continuum, at least not proven. It is most often a lot of choppy vague memories connected in hindsight, and this is a dynamic process both when aware and unaware.

I can make a strong assumption based on understanding the matter(!) involved.
Matter is disconnected and does not form a substantial unity that we perceive consciousness to be, so it will never be an adequate explanation.

And the neurological pattern you're looking for is merely a topological representation of the soul in the brain, which is further mystifying.

>There is no hard problem. I will explain consciousness to you by waving my hands and calling you a dualist

hard problem deniers in a nutshell

You just keep talking in platitudes and buzzwords..

So you don't believe in your self?
You don't think there is an entity which is responsible for and experiences all of it's life?
Do you not believe in the justice system as that would be punishing disconnected mental acts?

I didn't say that, and this isn't about what I believe in. This is about using logic and reason on your pontificating. Your insights are nothing new to anyone who has thought about this.

I tried to explain this earlier.
Matter is disconnected.
The informational processing of awareness is whole.
One neuron doesn't know what the entirety of the brain is doing.

How is the distinction between "conscious experience in general" and "qualia" made?

Awareness is not whole. Take introductory psychology or neuroscience if you disagree. You should consider how much information you act on of which you have no awareness.

information porcessing IS experience. The fact is though that things like computers, though very powerful potentially are not made for perception which is the key to consciousness. Animals and humans have very broad and deep sensory pool of sensory information they draw from about the outside world (e.g. audition, vision, touch etc) as well as their inside worlds (hunger, thirst, sleepiness, flight or fiight etc etc).

They can build very comprehensive models of the world and the kind of sensory states they prefer to live in. They create generative models from this input which becomes hierarchically abstracted and integrated; to the point of very comprehensive cognitive maps of themselves. They come to infer their own existence.

Computers are made for specific reasons, not perception and not inference.
you are overly simplifying consciousness. you can see in experimental manipulations and through thigns like brain injury that consciousness is infact very malleable and manipulable. It can be manipulated in graded degrees along with how you can manipulate the brain. Sure there are parts of the brain that are responsible for seeming unity of our sense of self and awareness of that and we do know about those brain areas to an extent.

but matter can form into emergent macroscopic systems which act as a unity.

>We act on information that is outside our awareness
>Therefore, our awareness is not whole

does not follow.

Your awareness is whole. things that happen outside of your awareness are by definition, not part of your awareness, therefore they have no bearing on the wholeness of your awareness.

Please don't get him on the scent of emergent phenomena. We already have enough misinterpretation to work with.

You're not even talking about awareness. You're arguing over the semantics of what it means to be whole.

I have taken psychology it didn't teach much. I learned more from psychology for dummies.

I'm confused by what you mean. You'll have to provide an example.

You are saying that conscious decision is not conscious? This is more like arguing for determinism which isn't what I was talking about.

Awareness is whole, it exists as a continuum.
If it wasn't there would be moments of awareness which would die leading to the birth of new moments of awareness that also die, so on and so forth.

I've seen no proof that artificial intelligence can be made due to virtue of processing information.

The more we investigate the brain's information processing the more we will discover it's mysterious relationship with the subjective self.

I mean someone could tell you a lie and you could operate on that lie as truth for your whole life. You're awareness could be anything but aware of the lie you're living.

I am talking precisely about awareness. No more. Awareness meaning, the entirety of things that you are aware of.

You are talking about Awareness + unconscious information processing. I am talking only about the former.

You're equating awareness to being whole i.e. 1 with the universe. That is not what "whole" is meant when talking about self awareness, which is the awareness in question when you try to invoke consciousness.

but its logic. what else is the self but processing information about your physical biological frame and making predictions about it. the fact is, computers just don't currently process the kind of information you need to have a self.

Just because it acts as a whole does not mean it is a viable physical substratum for consciousness.

It is not whole enough.

The closest substratum to consciousness in empirical science is plasmons.

give me a reason why? and tell me what a plasmon is.

qualia is what conscious experience in general feels like
so we both feel pain (conscious experience)
but we probably experience it differently (qualia)

I'm not looking for the soul, you dingus.
You're not saying anything and you're willfully ignoring me.

you think connecting an ear to a hard drive gives it hearing?
god bless.

Conflating information.

Plasmons utilize a single unified force (like awareness), a complicated magnetic field that organize the plasma into a cell-like structure. They are produced by plasma.

The field is not complicated, it's just random.

Consciousness is quantum. I ain't gotta explain shit.

>1 with the universe
Where did I say that?

Where did I even imply that?

I am talking about precisely what I have mentioned. Nothing more. Don't argue with things I haven't even said. I'm not invoking consciousness or any hippie bullshit that you are talking about

your just imposing mental categories

Couldn't an information processing machine gather and store info on light frequencies hitting different cells and then act on that information without ever being aware in the sense that we're aware when we see something, though? I'm not really trying to attack the problem of consciousness itself, which seems like, evolutionarily speaking, a matter of increasing complexity to the point of recursivity.

My confusion lies with how a base level of subjectivity is established in the first place. Why is a bat, as Nagel says, aware of anything?

Consciousness can be described as the self-awareness.
Qualia can be described as mental information the self is aware of.

i dont think there needs to be a great differentiation desu, i think your example of pain isnt actually a distinction but just an abstraction.

>Couldn't an information processing machine gather and store info on light frequencies hitting different cells and then act on that information without ever being aware in the sense that we're aware when we see something, though?
the first part you're describing is just our eyes relaying information to our brain
the second part may be what happens with that information inside our brain
questions to ponder: are we really aware of seeing something? can you confidently say the machine isn't aware of seeing something? is the machine aware of seeing something in a way different to humans? (think 'what is it like to be a bat'-style)
we don't want human beings to be 'simple' information processing machines
we want humans to be special
but there is no proof that they are not, excluding any assumption of 'the soul' being part of a human being
that's what some philosophers think as well
pain maybe not the best example
qualia is the subjective experience of a phenomenon afaik

yes it could and yes that would be on the continuum i would expect but i'd say that specific example doesn't necessitate the idea of a self. its analogous to a reflex like we when you tap the knee. It would be more through our kind of consciousness if it had to go through higher levels of processing and contextualisation of the signal.

Nagel is interesting. I think things can be functionally conscious but their experience is very different because they use e.g. bat example or even a some form of very complex computer. In other words, there probably isn't actually a base level and i think this kind of makes it difficult because when we say consciousness we automatically think of our experience now as humans. Maybe there is something else which is functionally conscious in the sense of having a sense of self; but what if it is so different that us that humans wouldn't even really think of it as conscious in the same way that they are. In a way i think our idea of consciousness is more or less subjective as you would expect from a concept based on our own self-perception rather than something scientifically defined and operationalised. Our concept of consciousness doesn't even have to be consistent because its poorly defined. I think consciousness and perception aren't necessarily even different conceptually except for complexity and what you would call a sense of self maybe.

i'd also say therefore, there is probably not a discrete way of delineating conscious and non-conscious. can have different qualities of consciousness based on how broad or complicated your information processing is. You could argue a plant is on its way to consciousness if it processes sensory inputs in some way.

>very different because they use different types of sensory information and process it differently e.g. bat example or even a some form of very complex computer. ***

ITT
>what hard problem?

in my opinion, i think we would know if a machine had awareness in some way simply if we knew what we had designed the machine to do. If we'd designed the machine to percieve self then i'd say thats pretty much the same thing as it really being aware. I think the awareness might be different to our own awareness obviously but i think it would be there and would you expect it to be the same as ours? is the same kind of awareness we have the right way of judging awareness?

I think the uncertainty of knowing if it was aware is an epistemic problem only because we are used to knowing directly and it creates uncertainty. But i think our own feeling of uncertainty doesnt mean that we can't have some sort of logical certainty. Sometimes we feel uncertain about something irrationally.

>are we really aware of seeing something
Well, by definition, I would say yes, or else we wouldn't be talking about it. Could you maybe rephrase? I'm guessing I misinterpreted what you meant by this.

>can you confidently say the machine isn't aware of seeing something?
Definitely not, no more than I can say anything about the awareness of anyone or anything else. For the sake of discussion, though, you have to make some assumptions, but that one could definitely be wrong.

>we want humans to be special
I'm not so much saying humans are special as I'm saying the phenomenon of awareness is, in humans or any other entity. It's also very ill-defined, probably because it's the foundation of all knowledge and it's very hard to say anything about the system from inside it.

that previous example is obviously a very simple machine whereas we humans are extremely complex machines
if we did build a system, a machine, as complex as a human being, its behaviour would be very difficult to predict, just as for humans
i think such a machine's consciousness would necessarily have to be different to my own in some way, as it the machine would not be me part for part, like the difference between me and a bat in a way
just comparing humans and humans is already difficult. can i really assert that your consciousness is the same as mine? how 'like' each other consciousness does a consciousness have to be to be the same?

the uncertainty of gauging consciousness of other living beings even has spurred the creation of things such as 'philosophical zombies'. maybe in the future we will have a technique that will allow us to make these things certain, just like we didn't used to have fMRI etc.


i'd say yes and no as well, but awareness of seeing something i think character limit?

the first question has to do with what being aware means
if you agree with me that the machine is aware then the human is definitely aware as well
if you disagree then you must give defense for why you think the human doesnt and why the machine does
the machine receives light on its sensors, which relays information to its information processing units, and changes its internal state to 'seeing light of this colour'
the human receives light on its eyes, which relays information through the optic nerve to the brain, and thinks 'im seeing a light of this colour'
i'd argue for the internal state of that machine to be seen as an abstraction of what our mental state as well

if you think only awareness is special, in what way do you think it is special? do you think the medium through which it produced is special? that it can only be produced in carbon based life forms? or could it also be produced in another way?

there is then also the question of whether there are any other 'conscious' entities

you can probably go to examples of people taking psychedelics or people with schizophrenia as examples of people that might have a different quality of consciousness.

There's definitely no way to defend that another human is aware while a computer isn't. The reason for that, obviously, is the impossibility of knowing whether or not any entity outside yourself is aware, human or otherwise. So really the entire question is intractable, but it's interesting to run the model under different assumptions and see what you come up with.

The interesting thing about "awareness", though, is the way it functions as a linguistic construct. It's discussed as if it was only one process among the many other processes and things in the world, when really it's the container of all others.

I dunno, do you think there's any way to talk about it without running into that recursivity?

> the retard ITT
All the crap that happens in your brain that makes you feel so special is just extra brain chugging away with no real purpose. Animals don't have consciousness like us because they don't have a big wad of extra brain trying to make itself useful.
Fire isn't fucking conscious of itself because it is a goddamn chemical reaction.

>What is the purpose of the brain
To computer for the meat robot parts. Just another way to help meat robots find more meat fuel.

You are an idiot, fuck off.

>try to use the most simple and elegant explanation
>soul
Are you literally retarded? Who typed that up for you?
The simplest and most elegant solution is that you have brainpower beyond what it takes to keep your body running, and that brainpower is used to make your life better beyond "breed, eat, shit" rather than just sitting there limp and idle.

I don't expect you to understand, you obviously go in for the "limp and idle" lifestyle.

for dualists and such the whole idea of 'awareness' or 'consciousness' is contained in the intangible 'soul', which is a nice solution if you dont like thinking that much
i think most people now prefer to think of consciousness somehow as a product of the brain
maybe our mind is what emerges when all parts of our brain are put together?
maybe when we uncover absolutely everythign at the lower and higher levels we will finally say 'ah, so THAT's what consciousness is'

well, look at what we're doing right now:
we're using that thing we're trying to define in trying to define that thing

were reasoning about something using that thing itself to reason about it
it's a really weird and awkward problem to solve

so no at this point i think it's really inevitable
but as i said earlier as well some of us used to treat the entire brain as a black box! right now some of us are trying to treat consciousness itself as a sort of black box! maybe later on we can see inside
>claims he gives perfect scientific explanation
>'soul'
i never should've replied to that guy

nope , brain activity can be controlled.
awareness can be hid.
you cant force someone to be active or aware. therefore neither can be used as proofs.

Not sure what exactly you're trying to say, but that image doesn't help your credibility much.

theres alot of blabber and unnecessary words in there, kiddo

I'm a retard although you don't even grasp the hard problem of consciousness. Pathetic.

Occam's razor wouldn't discredit the brain as a physical model for awareness until you analyzed the data properly.

Eh... I don't think so, you just need to broaden your vocabulary.