The “common sense of me”? I’m not sure what you mean. My “common sense” is nothing more than my accumulated knowledge about how things work. I learned that through observation and being told, which information was recieved through my eyes and ears and so forth and sent as electrical messages into my brain, where it was stored for later access. I don’t think that’s what you’re asking about though. Could you clarify?
It’s sort of an age old question of digging through the bio-meat [which is the organic you] and finding what it is about our thoughts, and thought patterns that make us who we are.
When we perceive the world around us what is desiphering the perceptions? We are of course. But who is the ‘we’?
The spirit inside? What is that? What makes us sentient? Science tells us consciousness is a pattern of electrical pathways in our brains that form thoughts. I ask who is deciphering the thoughts?
It’s not exactly the same thing, in the computer you know it’s the program because you probably wrote it. Even if you can only see a small part, it is something that is known. In the brain, just because you see electrical signals doesn’t mean those signals are consciousness. There is no evidence that they are, even if they were, there is no proof they originated in the brain. We really have nothing in the way of evidence that says consciousness resides in the brain. The electrical patterns of the EEG do not say whether the energy is going to the brain or coming from the brain. I can put a probe to the tuning coil of a TV and produce a TV program then turn the coil and a different TV program will appear. This is not proof that the TV program resides solely within the TV. We know it doesn’t. So how do we know if consciousness is local or non-local, we really don’t know. The majority of people in the world believe consciousness is non-local in the brain, that it is spiritual. Some of them have experienced that with out of body experiences. I know beliefs don’t count for much, either yours or mine. Many scientists have been trying to research this local, non-local property of consciousness. Their research is showing that consciousness is non-local to the brain. It is an extremely contested result, but other research by other scientists is also showing the same result. So it is now time to get serious and find out what is truth. I have a link here on one such research. Very interesting.
Why would you bother looking past the organic? We have no evidence whatsoever that we are anything but our brain. Conciousness is not a discrete thing, its what we observe as the result of all the processes of our brain and body.
We’re already at the point in understanding the brain, and how its functions are simply the electrochemical processes of the physical brain, that I think the concept of a “soul” which survives the death of the brain is no longer tenable.
I wish. In fact, the processor I’m involved in debugging is running an OS I had no part in writing. What’s going on at the time of failure is very problematic. I’m debugging hardware, not software.
In any case, we know where we are programmed. It’s a combination of genetic programming, education, and experience.
The signals are indeed not consciousness, but we might be able to monitor and prove consciousness if we could monitor every signal, and state, in the brain. Probably not possible. True, maybe some spooky entity is forcing signals into our brain - but maybe the same spooky entity is forcing charge into internal nodes of our computers, and making it look like the computer is a running a process. We can measure how much power the computer uses, and prove that it explains the signals, but we can do the same for the brain.
Your link does not demonstrate at all that consciousness is non-local. Even assuming we believe the results, a resident consciousness can probe by unknown means and read the envelope. We can hear things around corners without leaving our bodies, after all.
I’m not a trained psychologist, but I’d imagine that anyone wishing to convince journal editors of journals a bit more respected than the Journal of Psychic Research would have had someone sit with her who did not know the number, to eliminate the chance of accidental contamination. This kind of thing is why they run double blind studies. He doesn’t mention taping all conversations for further study either.
We are the ‘program’ that is running on the ‘biomass’. That is, the electricity stuff that is being pushed back and forth by the neural cells. What is deciphering the thoughts? The program in our brain ie the mind is deciphering the thoughts. Various programs on your computer routinely assess data, other programs, and themselves; why should the mind (the electrical program running on the brain) be necessarily incapable of doing the same?
The concept of the ‘soul’ was invented to explain the unknown, back when there was no example of a complicated analysis system existing wholly in electrical patterns. Back in the early 1900’s and before, it made no sense to think that wrinkly brain tissue could house something so fantastic or inexplicable as the mind, so the notion of the ‘soul’ made a certain degree of sense. Now, of course, we are surrounded by examples of mechanical things containing analytical processes, rendering the notion of the ‘soul’ unnecessary. (Tradition and wishful thinking can be expected to perpetuate the belief, of course. But such a belief is not longer necessary or reasonable.)
Hey, I was with you until you said “a resident consciousness can probe by unknown means and read the envelope.” What would be those unknown means?
If you don’t like that one I have a lot more. Like the study of “blind since birth” individuals that could see when they went out of body.
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence03.html
Can you observe a consciousness, yes, I think so, everytime you look at another person.
How much would it take for you to go away and stop spewing meaningless pseudoscientific babble?
To the o.p.: consciousness, insofar as we understand it at all, is a progressive collection of processes. We can observe some specific processes (identified neurographically by their lack when loss or trauma to those areas of the brain occurs) that are involving in various areas of cognition associated with the overall phenomena of consciousness, but consciousness itself is too poorly defined in any technical sense (and for that matter, in a philosophical sense) for us to point at a particularly pattern of activity and say, “There it is.”
I recommend Ian Glynn’s An Anatomy of Thought as a semi-technical introductory to our current understanding of neurological function and development, and Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory is an excellent non-technical coverage of memory and learning, as well as a memoir of Kandel’s research and receving the Nobel Prize in Phisiology or Medicine (as well as bunch of other awards). Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat details a number of cases in which failure or damage to some areas of the brain causes impariment in one or more areas of cognition.
Stranger
I’ve seen similar studies of people who light up optical receptors in their brain on a PET scan when they merely think about an object being described. Cool stuff.
But what I am looking into is not necessarily the soul, but the means by which we perceive. I’m a little fuzzy on the whole organic argument. That my feelings, and emotions are strictly a electrochemical reaction from an organ in my body. If this were true, then wouldn’t science belive animals with similar brain mass and function like some apes and cetaceans would feel and communicate just like we do?
Thanks, I’ll look into those. I like Oliver Sacks in much the same way I like Carl Sagan - both pioneers in their respective fields.
In fact, there’s a growing movement among zoologists and the like to recognize that many animals (including the “Great Apes”, many cetaceans, and others) have at least limited self-awareness/cognitive intelligence and are capable of complex emotional states, and thus are due a certain level of protection based upon their natural rights as quasi-sentient beings. I’m not talking of flaketastical groups like PETA, but organizations like the Great Ape Project which have support and backing from reputable scientists in the fields of zoology and neurology.
Stranger
Good, as a voracious environmentalist and naturalist I hope they do get some support from those fields.
There was an interesting article in the May 2007 issue of Scientific American (“Eyes Open, Brain Shut”) which covered how scientists and doctors were using brain scans to see if patients were in a coma, a vegetative state, or a minimally conscious state, and the quest to improve their predictive techniques (to see if vegetative patients will improve or slip into a persistent state, etc.). As in many situations in life, the different classifications were more of a continuum than clearly delineated with black and white criteria. Certain characteristics applied to both classifications in some cases, but progress is being made.
In the case of a 23 year old woman who was in a traffic accident and was slowly transitioning from a vegetative state to a minimally conscious state they discovered that she was actually ‘in there’ before the minimally conscious state was diagnosed by conventional means. At first they talked to her and played sounds set to certain scenes (e.g. a coffee break) and her brain lit up in the appropriate areas. However, this didn’t mean anything necessarily because this also happens to normal people when they sleep and sometimes even under general anesthesia, so they took it one step further:
There was also a lot of other interesting things, like when they showed that certain patients couldn’t feel pain as normal people do because their brains didn’t communicate with the right parts correctly
Do you actually know the difference between a “study” and a “story”, because I could have sworn we’ve explained it to you before.
Several times.
A fair question, it would take some real evidence that what I post is wrong.
What you are calling “meaningless pseudoscientific babble” is not my work or study. I have presented the studies of qualified reseachers working at mainstream universities. So why don’t you tell them where they went wrong. I am sure they would love to hear from you.
What you say about damage to the brain is true, but you are not addressing the fact that at least some functions lost to brain damage are transferred to other parts of the brain. I wonder who does the transferring. We are seeing a lot of this happening with the soldiers wounded in Iraq. Also I don’t think we can tell whether the electrical activitity in the brain is created by the brain or comes from an outside source.
I will provide yet another link by a qualified researcher for you enjoyment.
Let’s not fight, we can just say this was a story of the study. I am not real good at grammer or semantics, but if this is the only fault found, I feel pretty good about it. I have a lot more links.
Honorton’s remote viewing (published in the same “journal” no doubt) doesn’t involve OBEs. As for mechanism, you tell me the non-physical mechanism for consciousness first. Given that and the level of evidence you’ve provided, I can make up stuff as well as you. I think Honorton’s experiments were better conducted than this one. I actually saw a lecture by the guy at Princeton - I was not convinced.
Here’s a bibliography, by the way. I bet they’re at least as valid as your’s.
I’m not him, but I can field this: the program in the brain might maybe be capable of adjusting itself to changing conditions, under certain circumstances. Not entirely unlike a computer that can run a virus-checker and thereby modify its own files to correct a problem, or one that can detect that you unplugged your ipod from one usb port and put it in another one.
I think the going rate is $500.