Consciousness is a Biological Problem

For the moment, please do trust me, in that while I can see how, with that previous post alone, one may be able to associate (patternize) a 'soul-like' separation out of the situation, it is by far the least likely answer (as seen when other conditions are added into the broth of the overall understanding). One thing to keep in mind with the motor system understandings (and this much is very, very secure an understanding) is that while the cortical areas have control over the sub-cortical areas in motor control, and those, in turn, relay information which helps in cortical feed-forward-like decision making (esp. prefrontal to sensoromotor relay stuff after mid-brain coloring [such as 'emotional attachment' to signals]), when some degree of abnormality occurs in the basal ganglia, that control can be, and very often is, lost. What then occurs, is that that sub-cortical structure is performing on its own to some degree--sometimes more, sometimes less. This is because, as I have pointed out before (and which may well take some more time to more fully appreciate), brain is conscious. (where conscious does not refer to the overall state of the brain having consciousness, but that state which is in the continuum, AND, brain is in the uncountable context.)

very intriguing. this may be extremely relevant to my line of thinking, though my line of thinking may be totally irrelevant. anyway, my interest is piqued once again.

It is like a person standing with their back to the mirror and pleased with what they do not see.

... afterwhich I intend to argue against both the 'soul' camp's position and jeeprs #98 proposition.

But then, with a TV turned off, there is no television show, either. Yet TV shows are not produced by the television, they are only transmitted by it. Take out the blue gun, for example, and the colours will not display properly. Unplug the television and you will see nothing.

Im sorry but this analogy, which has been abused a number of times by skeptics, is not only trivializing the matter and humanities entire epistemology, but also gets us no where fast. Radical skepticism is only entertainment for the mentally shallow. We all have thoughts about the supernatural, living inside a matrix, brains in vats, etc... but, honestly, where does this get us? This mind-numbing thought process has no way of being verified, justified, or has even a single pragmatic property. Should I respond with just the same insanity by asserting some sort of solipsistic scenario? If you want to claim hyperdualism, SUPPORT IT. This goes for anyone.

... hmmm - I don't even know what hyperdualism is, and so am unfamiliar with the history of this TV analogy ... but taking those four sentences in the larger context of the post, they can be read as an analogy that human consciousness can be radically altered by removing key parts of the brain, the body, and/or the world ... that human consciousness, as the dynamic nexus of these, can fail catastrophically and may in fact never have arisen without all three ... perhaps I am misreading jeeprs here - but if you remove those offending four lines from the post would you then find it reasonable? ...

... you may want to reconsider the jeeprs #98 part ...

Radical skepticism is only entertainment for the mentally shallow.

"We all have thoughts about the supernatural, living inside a matrix, brains in vats, etc... but, honestly, where does this get us?"

This mind-numbing thought process has no way of being verified, justified, or has even a single pragmatic property.

Should I respond with just the same insanity by asserting some sort of solipsistic scenario? If you want to claim hyperdualism, SUPPORT IT. This goes for anyone.

I denied consciousness? no, I denied mind.if you deny soul and it is synonymous with mind, you would also have to deny mind.

I find the term redundant. but we are getting close now I think. the first and second of my queries can be combined by my understanding as follows:
are you saying that mind comprises a part of consciousness?

perhaps you mean mind is subjective experience as defined by the content of the experience being confined to thoughts rather than perceived through the physical senses? brain is objective, while mind and consciousness are both subjective, though you can produce evidence to show they exist. is that a fair statement of your position?

regarding the last query I raised: so you think a sense of humor is irrelevant to the issue? I think neuroscience can show where is the domain of emotional content and what physical part of the brain reacts to certain stimuli to produce emotion, do you?

maybe it cant-i could be wrong. however a sense of humor is not an emotion-and I am asking, has humor been pinned down like that? in other words for a start, is there an area in the brain which when stimulated with a probe will in every case cause the subject to experience the sense of humor and react by laughing as he would in any given situation he found humorous?

and no, I am not saying where this leads us as yet because I dont know. but I feel it is significant.

I also would like to point out, that I have taken that particular presentation there, in light of other things said in other threads, and an overall position from which that particular post had thus evidently come (although I will not deny that there could be some room for error in understanding, conceptualizing, 'reading').

The first half of the post bags on 'materialism' as a support system for the second half of his idealism -claiming that there are some sort of 'rules' or 'laws' of consciousness embedded in reality (i.e. that consciousness is fundamental to reality). This is noted by, "Therefore, I argue, the brain does not create consciousness. The requirements for consciousness create the brain." and why he talks about natural laws by analogy.

It seems to me that alot of the mythology regarding consciousness has clouded our minds and has kept us wanting to keep the mysterious a mystery. For seeing how the card trick is done by a magician kinda takes away from its value from then on.

Edit: Hyperdualism is where the TV analogy comes from. It poses that the brain is equivalent to a receiver and 'receives' consciousness from some other realm. That is why it came up with the TV analogy.

what is the biological explanation of humor? if there is an area in the brain that is responsible and must be stimulated what is its purpose? a person slips on a banana peel and falls down-why would this be a stimulus to humor? it would seem to be to be a learned response, as a result of the social context in which a person lives. now the question is, by what mechanism does social environment cause one brain to react by laughing and another by crying? how does social interaction change the material in the human brain so that it generates opposite behaviors?(bold mine)

I doubt it but maybe. Yea ask KJ he knows alot.

Materialism is the belief that everything is reducible to matter. So of course the materialist view is that mind is a byproduct of the brain (=consciousness is biological). The brain is something you can examine. In the materialist, or naturalist, view, reality is what you examine through the microscope and the telescope. And you can surely demonstrate that without the brain, no consciousness exists, so it seems to have empirical support. Whack somebody on the head, no consciousness. Do a split-brain operation, observe a patient with damage to this or that part of the brain, and correlate the effect on their consciousness. It is quite simple.

But then, with a TV turned off, there is no television show, either. Yet TV shows are not produced by the television, they are only transmitted by it. Take out the blue gun, for example, and the colours will not display properly. Unplug the television and you will see nothing.

While it is certainly the case that for this or that subject, if the brain is non-functional, then there is no consciousness, why therefore assume that consciousness is something that occurs only within the individual brain? It might be considered that consciousness is actually a collective phenomena or structure and that in some sense it is also external to the brain (and the individual mind). Logically, this is supported by the fact that the structures which determine intellectual ability, such as language, spatial reasoning, and number, not to mention the many years of extra-somatic conditioning that occurs with humans after they are born (or culture), and which shapes their consciousness, are not the product of this or that individual brain but instead have shaped the brain.

Indeed they provide the structures by which consciousness is able to recognise and operate within the world and society. And without these structures - or forms - consciousness could not exist. Bring a child up with wolves, they will run around on all fours and bark. Deprive them of all sensory simulation, they will not even develop consciousness (hard to verify, I admit.) Yet the brain might be functionally quite intact (albeit atrophied). The brain is working, but consciousness has not developed nomally, or is absent, for reasons that have nothing to do with brain function.

For an example of the way in which the consituents of consciousness are neither biological nor internal, let us consider number.

I am sure we don't invent number. Numbers must be independent of particular minds because they are common to all who think. In coming to grasp them, consciousness cannot convert them into its possessions or alter them. Also the mind discovers rather than forming or constructing them, and its grasp of them can be more or less adequate. For this reason, numbers cannot be part of consciousness' own nature or produced by consciousness out of itself. They must exist independently of individual human minds.

Yet numbers are not material objects, and certainly not 'biological'. They are eternal and immutable (leaving aside for a moment questions of conditions at the singularity and other speculations). Certain numerical objects, such as prime numbers, could not exist, because all existing things can be divided, and prime numbers cannot be. They therefore cannot be perceived by means of the senses, but only by reason.

Consider also our grasp of natural laws. We can make predictions about how nature will operate and then test the predictions by experiment. If the predictions are falsified, we change our formulation of the laws. In this way, the law of nature must be higher than reason, because by it, reason is judged. Yet only by virtue of reason are we able to grasp it. And this is because reason is also the outcome of the operation of natural law. But again natural law is superior to reason.

On these grounds, I dispute that either natural laws or numbers are 'in our minds'. Certainly our minds grasp them, but they are not therefore a product of the brain. Yet consciousness cannot function effectively without such structures.

Now let us consider the evolution of consciousness. Certainly as human intelligence has evolved, so too has its ability to calculate and grasp abstract concept, to count and to discover natural law. Were early humans unable to count or predict the movements of the herds then presumably they would not have survived. So one can easily see that natural selection would promote intellectual ability, as it was germane to our existence. It will be hard to dispute that intellectual ability - consciousness - has evolved throughout millenia in response to the requirement to recognise abstract quality such as number and natural law. And that this has now given rise to abilities far above and beyond those needed for simple survival.

Therefore our very consciousness has evolved in accordance to the pre-existing intelligibility and order of the natural realm. So you can say that the intelligibility of the Universe must have pre-existed us, in order for our consciousness to work as effectively as it now does. Our intellectual ability evolved in response to the pressures of survival, in other words, the brain structures which supported just this type of consciousness developed through natural selection. As this happened, we realised greater and greater levels of consciousness (a process which is still in progress.) But that of which we are conscious, and to a large extent the means by which we are conscious of it, pre-exists us, and in an important sense 'gave birth' to us.

Therefore, I argue, the brain does not create consciousness. The requirements for consciousness create the brain.

[With acknowledgement to St. Augustine for the argument from numbers and intelligible forms.]

actually yes

electrical stimulation in the right place in the temporal lobe can bring on euphoria and laughing fits

in fact temporal lobe stimulation can conjure up very strange feelings that people would not usually have otherwise

---------- Post added 09-04-2009 at 03:47 AM ----------

I'm reading a book about this called Emotion Explained, it's aimed at upper undergrad / early grad level students and has its dull stretches but if you read judiciously you can get a pretty good impression of emotion; its role in learning, cognition and our survival; and our current understanding of its underlying neural mechanisms

my next avenue to follow would be art, the creation and appreciation of all forms of art. because of music having a physical effect through sound waves and vibrations, and colors having effects on emotion, it would be better to consider other forms of art excluding music, dance and paintings. there doesnt seem to me to be any logical reason for art to have evolved as a result of natural selection according to survival needs. for instance what is the reason someone would want to sculpt a statue and why would people want to see a collection of statues? where does this come from and what is its place in biological or neurological processes?

I am not sure I understand the implication of your post. it seems to me that you are saying numbers and natural law exist apart and outside of human consciousness-yet we have been able to discover and use them, presumably with reason as a sensory function of the intellect? and by that being true does it follow that there is some part of our consciousness that is in effect apart and outside of us?

I am assuming that materialists will not believe there is any such realm beyond the physical and will see numbers as something we created. I was wondering if we could prove we know of anything outside the physical realm that would be enough to prove that there is something of human consciousness that exists in that realm as well. do you think so?

by the way, jeep, the article on [Alva] Noe was especially relevant, here is a quote: "A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world.

This is perhaps the biggest idea I can talk with you about today: the problem of consciousness and the problem of life are in effect the same problem, and that the problem with so much of the science of consciousness today is that it treats consciousness as somehow separable from the mode of dynamic activity, which is the consciousness".