I didn’t mean to imply any differently. Apologies if I wasn’t clear about that.
This is not convincing. If someone loses their ears, sound does not cease to exist. If someone pokes out their eyes, light does not simply return to the void.
All that the evidence strongly suggests is that the brain is deeply involved with experiencing consciousness. Is it the ultimate source, or is it merely some sort of tether to something we don’t yet understand?
I suspect the first, hope for the second, and have not yet read anything that definitively answers the question without resorting to some element of faith (religious or scientific).
I also read Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind as well as the counter arguments. I do not agree with your opinion. I am curious why you call it “a load of crap,” though. Does it not jive with some deeply held belief of yours? Is there some particular aspect of his very detailed analysis that doesn’t work at all? Or are you just not happy with the idea of QM playing a role in consciousness?
For me, the strongest evidence that he might be on to something is the ease that we can deal with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. We somehow can accept as true, and understand the truth, of things that by their very nature are unprovable. I am not talking about faith here, but about self-evident truths that are still unprovable.
I remember reading a phiilisophical tract about how to go about defining the number “1”. You cannot use physical objects to help, because who is to say that the property “1” defined for some objects will apply to other objects? The upshot is that there is not really a good definition of “1”, but we all understand the concept anyway! Do not get me started about 1+1=2. 
Set Theory somewhat obscures this issue, but ultimately runs into exactly the same problems which are solved axiomatically. And yet, we understand the axioms.
I just cannot see a Turing Machine being able to handle that at all. And if the brain is not a Turing Machine, then we are still missing some major fundamental piece of the puzzle. I don’t know if QM is the correct answer here; but, given what we know about QM (and don’t really understand!), I think looking there for the answer is justifiable.
Maybe I should have asked a psychologist after all. :rolleyes:
I don’t have a position on this, but I think it’s interesting that QM, via Bell’s theorem requires us to choose between reality and locality. As one documentary described it, either you reject the idea that everything in the universe is connected to everything else (non-locality) or you reject the idea that there is an objective, measurable reality (non-counterfactual definiteness). No one ever seems to like the first option.
‘Scientific faith’ is a contradiction in terms. Science is all about removing the element of faith, replacing it with provisional theories backed up by evidence and logic.
Claiming science is based on faith is something some (not all, only some!) of the religious faithful do because, apparently, they cannot comprehend that some people don’t need faith to function as human beings. They’re likely the same group that say, apparently in all seriousness, that if they didn’t believe in Jesus they’d go out and murder everyone they saw. Their mental limitations have no bearing on anyone else.
And thus science fools itself. Of course science needs faith. At the very least, you have to have faith that the scientific method is going to give you better results than other methods. I share this faith.
However, even if you were to pretend that the scientific method is better than others a priori, you still have to stomach a lot of faith. I think we can agree that mathematics is the most rational of all areas of human endeavor. And Gödel showed that we cannot prove everything that is true inside of that most rational of constructs. So at some level, you need faith that what you know is true, really is true; because, some things, you just cannot prove.
If it were just Gödel and Mathematics! Every interesting system we develop or study is riddled with the same uncertainty. Leaving out QM, which should cause every scientist to question sanity itself, we could still take something as boring as a Turing Machine, and show that we can never generically prove if a program that is run on our machine will ever end. But we take it as an article of faith that we’ll be able to tell, if it’s important. We have faith that we’ll find rules that will get us through a specific case, even though we have already proven that the generic case is not solvable.
Consciousness, I think we can all agree, is a holistic manifestation; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
We barely understand the brain itself, let alone consciousness/sapience.
I can’t really pinpoint why, but I dislike using computer and software as analogies for the human brain and mind. My gut says its the wrong way to look at it, but that’s neither here nor there.
I’ve used this analogy in passing before, but I like this better: I can see our brain as a musical instrument, like a violin. The music (our consciousness) isn’t in the body, the strings, the bow or the resin on the bow. It’s not in the f-holes, or even in the vibrating air molecules we call sound. It’s in the melody itself. The spooky part is, the instrument seems to be playing itself, and can play many tunes, and get better with practice.
You damage the instrument, the poorer the music, the less it can play. A lesser instrument can only play lesser complicated pieces (hard to play Bach on the bongos… I don’t care how Feynman might feel about that). Yet, the music it creates is the musician (or so it seems).
Enough with analogies, though. Our minds do work on electrochemical processes. And, of course the hero of electric phenomena is the electron—a fermion and very subject to quantum phenomena.
So, right from the very first, freely flowing sub-atomic particle involved in brain activity, and every other aspect of physics from, how the fuck magnets work, why our ass doesn’t pass right through our chair to enabling your eyes to detect these very words on your monitor.
In that regard, I’d hardly say physics aren’t capable of explaining consciousness. In fact, it’s laying the very foundations.
You can’t understand something fundamentally, without first establishing what the fundamentals are.
All that said, QM is the most tested theory we currently have in physics. However, it’s far from being completely understood; indeed top physicists are in search for a unification theory. Something that makes it all clear, and will offer untold insights into the deeper layers of the fundamental fabric of reality.
Does our consciousness use some as-yet-undiscovered law or probabilities of the quantum realm—or should I say post-quantum physics—We can’t know until we get to the bottom of it all.
Hopefully we can, either way, meanwhile… enjoy the music.
I like the analogy of music. Nicely put. After all, math is just a language. Maybe - for now a least - just not the best language to describe consciousness with.
I am not quite clear what is so mysterious about consciousness. It is just a biological function, somewhat enhanced in humans.
Living things want to survive, especially to propagate, so they gradually evolve to select the stronger survival instinct and the superior adaptation. Primary consciousness is a being needs in order to eat without being eaten (though being eaten is sometimes a strategy) at least long enough to find a mate. Most animals have some level of primary consciousness, from the nematode to the flamingo, optimized for their species’ needs. Even plants have a rudimentary consciousness, though it exists on a scale that tends to defy our perception.
So what makes humans different? Our thumbs? Our brain size? No, it is nothing more than language. Our ability to effectively communicate ideas, to conceive what we cannot perceive and to plan and to remember, facilitated through complex language, is what makes us different. It expands our conscious horizon beyond this place right now into Sparta, Cahokia, R’lyeh, endows us with the means to imagine and invent.
The examples of “wolf-boys” and other non-socialized children seem to indicate that there is a language acquisition window in early development which must not be missed or the person will be stuck in the moment. Human children are kind of a blank slate, a big reason for our flexibility and success, language gives us the means to fill our heads with algorithms, abstraction and imagination. Consciousness is nothing more than this, overlaid upon the survival-reality of now.
Thank you for your comment. Music is also language used to communicate emotions. Even software is language so everything fits now
Something is still bothering me though. How come we cannot explain consciousness with math? Is this because the math or language is parallel to consciousness, or because the math is insufficient?
How about because we know nothing at all about consciousness? As this thread has thoroughly proved.
Because we’ve only been around as a species for 50,000 years, and these things take time. Everything we now know, we didn’t know at some point.
And, when we didn’t know them, people have always been quick to make up fanciful explanations based loosely on familiar things. Earthquakes? Well, maybe a giant spider is moving around inside the earth, because I’ve seen spiders and I know they move, so why not? 1000 years pass Oh, wait, it’s just tectonic plates shifting. Thunder? We’ve angered the gods! Whatever you just did, don’t do that anymore! Or, maybe do it more?! 1000 years pass Oh, wait, it’s just the rapid expansion of hot gas after a lightning strike, which is just a big spark due to an accumulation of excess electrons either in a cloud or on the ground. Consciousness? Maybe there’s some software that runs and binds things… No wait, we’ve been down this path before. Let’s try to get something based on evidence. But, it might take 1000 years. The key is to keep pushing science forward… and in the meantime, to not have too much anxiety about not knowing something, because it’s okay.
Because you can not quantitatively define it. You can craft beautiful, useless just-so stories about how you think it works but that doesn’t make it so. A scientific approach requires that your model predict outcomes and allow for those predictions to be falsified in a controlled and repeatable manner
What you are saying is what we miss is a scale? :smack:
I believe the thing people find mysterious and fascinating about consciousness/sapience/self-awareness is the overwhelming feeling that there is an “I” somewhere that resides in you. An immaterial “You” at the helm of this body you happen to find yourself attached to. The feeling that it seems your consciousness is an entity in and of itself is unshakable to the point where you can image your mind being able to exist without the body if we found some way.
The truth is, no one really knows how far down that particular rabbit hole goes, and this mind/body feeling is the most surely the source that many base a belief of a soul or spirit that exists, apart from the body, in some supernatural sense.
Quote: “Because we’ve only been around as a species for 50,000 years, and these things take time. Everything we now know, we didn’t know at some point.”
If you ever find it, just step into your time machine to post on this thread. :rolleyes:
I think it’s more complicated.
It’s like trying to quantify a modulated radio signal that’s transmitting an episode of Seinfeld. Except, all you know is there exists radio waves, but have no inkling of the idea of frequencies, modulation, amplitude, or any way knowledge of how tuning into these quantities work.
All you know is radio = funny episode on my TV. You need more data and knowledge in order to quantify what is an episode of television, where does it originate, and how is it displaying on your TV set.*
*Not meant as a metaphor for consciousness—I don’t by into the idea that the soul is transmitted from somewhere and our brain is the receiver.
Are you rolling your eyes in derision to the quote, or more toward yourself. Usually that emoticon is used to express pretty negative derision toward another’s statement.
But I don’t see why you would use it like that to some of the quotes you’ve applied it to.
Just curious.