Where does consciousness reside? If you did away with every limb, every organ except for your brain, would you still be you? Assuming that you could keep the brain alive by itself, would you still be able to think in first person as you normally do?
Assuming that consciousness resides in the brain (does it?), could it be “saved” until a later date through something like cryogenic preservation.
In other words, if you can preserve your brain, can you preserve your consciousness? If you had you brain preserved for hundreds of years and transplanted to a new body, would you exist in the same functional capacity that you do today?
Enough restating the same question over and over to find the right wording because I doubt it exists. Time for responses and mind-fuck.
To a large degree, although you’d from the evidence suffer from a flattening of the emotions. The brain appears to use the body as part of its processing of emotion; you’d want some kind of simulated replacement to make the brain work right without the rest of the body.
Yes.
Probably; presumably the data for a functioning mind is still all there. It’s restoring the frozen brain or reading the data preserved in it and putting it in a brain-substitute that’s the hard part.
This is the next question I had. If you did manage to transfer the “contents” of the brain to a different container, would it not act as a copy or clone instead of an extension or augmentation? Is there anything that is known about what provides consciousness besides thoughts and memories? Is it known whether or not a physical portion of the brain executes the function of consciousness at the most elemental level? What makes my brain, “my brain” and not just “a brain?”
(Excuse all of the quotation marks, I missed the italicize button)
If the original version is inactive or destroyed there’s no difference. Our brains are constantly rebuilding themselves, with new matter replacing old matter; there’s no physical continuity there. Questions of copying only really matter when there’s more than one version of your mind in operation at once.
If there’s more than one version of you operating, is the other copy you? I say, “sort of”. This isn’t a situation that occurs in nature, and our concepts of identity aren’t built to handle it. A diverged copy of you isn’t really “you” in the strictest of senses; but it isn’t “somebody else” the way that, say, I am either. It’s something in between.
The specific information stored in it, and the fact that it’s the brain asking “is this brain me?”.
Speaking as a good materialist, yeah. The brain is a machine. A hugely complex one, so damn complex that it can generate self-consciousness. But it is, ultimately, a material object, made of of physical components.
The concept of “the spark of life” used to be a central part of natural science. It was believed that organic chemistry was meaningfully different than inorganic chemistry. This idea was demolished, and is not heeded today.
The same pertains to the idea of a mind having some quality, some value, some meaning that is more than the sum of its parts. It is still widely believed by many, but there is simply no evidence for it.
If there were an extra-physical soul, how would it connect to the physical brain? What is the interface? What happens if that interface is physically damaged, say by a stroke? Could an evil brain-surgeon cut it away from the rest of the brain, thus disconnecting your soul? Pretty much every possible part of the human brain has been damaged, in head injuries or strokes. The loss of various functions and perceptions has been described…but nobody seems to have lost their soul this way.
So: yes, if you had a really good scanning machine, that could identify all the neurons and axons and their interconnections and structure – way, way down to the level of individual molecules – then, in abstract theory, if you had computing power several billion times greater than anything around today, you could build a simulator, and “run a program” that exactly duplicated the thinking of a person’s mind.
Or, y’know, just go out and have a baby. Much easier!
‘Consciousness’ is not well understood at present. It’s not even clear if ‘consciousness’ can be seperated from the brain, in the way that a computer program (Microsoft Word) or a document (a letter written with MS Word) can be seperated from a computer.
Or if consciousness is more like the Intel Processor inside the computer, where the thoughts are like documents, but the consciousness is part of the hardware?
In the late part of the 20th century, the standard view was that consciousness was a disseminated property: no isolated physical portion of the brain executed consciouness. In the early 21st century, a small region was discovered that was particularly sensitive to making you unconcious. BUT.consciousness is not the same as being not unconscious. They are seperate by related concepts, and it’s not clear how seperate or how related.
Even if we could make a computer with the capacity of the human brain to run a human mind on, it is by no means clear what the ‘contents’ is, and what is mere hardware.
We do know that by all present experiments, the mind restarts back to almost the current person after sleep, drunkeness, unconsciouness, epileptic cataleptic and catatoni fits, convulsions, near death experiences, trance states, hypnosis, drug induced psychosis and electroconvulsive therapy.
However, even afte sleep, people may find that you are a ‘different person’ and the mind is notably altered by brain injury and by being dumped by your SO.
Consciousness can’t be decoupled from sensation. We know that when people are put into sensory deprivation tanks brain function rapidly breaks down. So you can’t have just a brain in a jar. It needs to be hooked up to some sort of sensory input.
I suspect that we’ll eventually find hard evidence that consciousness is just recursive social simulation. We’re social animals. We evolved to live in groups. So the human brain is good at simulating other human brains to predict what they will do. But our model of social interaction can be more accurate if we include a simulation of our own brains as well … .
There is absolutely zero evidence for this (or for your other assertions). I challenge you to produce a single piece of evidence showing that brains separated from bodies continue to be conscious, or even that brain removed from one body and grafted into another would regain its original capacities (let alone its original conscious personality). Of course you can’t. The experiment has never been done, and is never likely to be done.
By contrast, there is quite a lot of evidence that consciousness is reliant in multiple ways on bodily structures and functions other than those of the brain, and loss of various bodily functions result in losses of aspects of conscious experience. No doubt the brain is the organ most extensively involved in all aspects of consciousness - loss of your eyes, for instance, although it will certainly impact your visual consciousness very negatively, will leave that of other sense modes intact, whereas loss of your brain will destroy consciousness entirely - but it does not follow that only the brain matters, or that a brain could be conscious on its own, no matter what fantasies science fiction writers and philosophers may have indulged themselves in. The popular notion of a disembodied brain that continues to think and be conscious is nothing but a dogmatic hangover from Cartesian dualism, where it was the disembodied soul hiding away within the brain that was considered capable of disembodied consciousness. People who insist vehemently that consciousness is all about the brain are not being the good materialists they think they are. On the contrary, they are refraining from following the implications of materialism to their logical conclusion. The brain is just another bodily organ; it does not have special, magical consciousness-generating powers that other organs lack.
Here [PDF] is a detailed essay explaining why, once you start to look at the actual biological details, the philosophical fantasy of a conscious “brain in a vat” is a practical, and almost certainly an absolute, empirical impossibility.
The evidence is the fact that everyone appears to have conscious minds, so a brain transplanted into a new body and properly hooked up would presumably gain the same input in did in the original body. Unless you want to claim that only a small percentage of the population is self aware and intelligent and that only their bodies can support that then your argument makes little sense.
And people whose brains are largely separate from their bodies (except for life support from the body naturally), people with locked in syndrome are still conscious. their emotions flatten, but they still think.
:rolleyes: No, it doesn’t have “magic”; what it has is brain cells. It has something to think with.
The brain is where most of the processing of the information we receive happens and I think a materialist view may tend to miss the significance of this. The materialist view seems to be a philosophical extension of classical physics, however we know classical physics is far from the full story. In quantum mechanics the role of an observer is vitally important as the act of observation changes the state of a system in a special way that is different from other interactions and whilst psychophysical parallelism is nearly universally rejected by serious physicists the role of consciousness in observation is not a question that can be got away from.
Although quantum physics may very well play a part in brain chemistry – in fact, it certainly does! There are recent articles in Scientific American and Science News on the subject – I think it is wrong to try to apply it at such a large scale as cognitive science. The observer effect applies to individual electrons, but not so much to the very large molecules involved in brain chemistry.
I think we’ve had a couple of recent threads on this. It’s not quite as simple as people assume, and I’m not talking about souls or anything like that.
For example, if I duplicate my brain, that’s clearly another Mijin, qualitatively identical to me, but *is it *me? I would argue no. I am a specific instance of consciousness, it’s irrelevant to me how similar other consciousnesses are to me, even if they have exactly my memories and personality.
For another example, the assumption that a computer simulating a brain necessarily is conscious is known as Strong AI, and it’s a contentious topic in philosophy too. It may seem obviously true to some, but bear in mind the distinction between a machine and a computer. The brain may be the former but not the latter.
That may mean a computer simulating a brain is no more conscious than a computer simulating a hurricane will get you wet.
I’m not saying this perspective is necessarily the correct one, merely that there are multiple, Materialist, perspectives.
I can see how it might not be “you” in the finest philosophical terms…but what if the copy is simply so darn good, nobody can tell the difference, not even you? In terms of conundrums, it really doesn’t make much difference, because the terms aren’t really definable. What is “me” in well-defined terms? Which one is “me” if the copy is exact, right down to each individual electron’s quantum state?
In practical terms, I’d be happy to swap places with a “me” that was merely a 99.99999% accurate copy. Heck, I’ve lost far more functionality than that simply by living to be my current age!
Well again, it’s Mijin, so I have no issue with saying that as far as the outside world is concerned, it is me.
But whether it is one and the same first-person perspective as me, that’s the issue.
The one that has bodily continuity? I don’t know, I’m just saying this is not a settled issue.
If I have a coin, and you have a coin, it’s irrelevant if they’re identical: this coin is not that coin.
I’d be happy swapping out a lot more than that, if I could be sure the same instance of consciousness was being preserved.
Consciousness is not an object, but a process. Like fire, or a wave. Fire is not fuel, and a wave is not water. Fire requires fuel, and a wave requires water, but they’re not the same. Consciousness is something the brain does, but it’s not the brain, or any part of it.
Furthermore, consciousness is real, but the continuity of the individual is an illusion. You’re not the same person you were a year ago, or yesterday. Consciousness reasserts itself from moment to moment. “You”, as a person, are constantly dying, and being reborn, from moment to moment. You resemble your past self, but you’re subtly different. Over time you may become totally different from who you used to be. The idea that that past person is “you” is an illusion.
The problem comes from conflating some collection of attributes that you identify as “you” (tall, smart, friendly, curious) with consciousness. They’re not the same.
I’m not talking about the physics of the brain itself so much, as in Penrose’s theory- I’m talking about the role of the observer in quantum theory and it’s relationship to consciousness and the human brain. What causes a wavefunction to collapse? etc, etc.
Myself I think the answer may lie in the human brain and consciousness - not in a psychophysical parallelist way though, more in the way of inherent biases introduced into how we perceive the World due to the physics of the human brain and how it has evolved to function.
If I have a program, and I save it then run it on another computer, this program is that program.
As njtt says, the brain is not the only important organ in the construction of consciousness; but if it were possible to replicate the entire brain/body system, then the program would be the same, so the consciousness would be the same.
Taking this train of thought a bit further, consciousness is not just the interplay of the brain and the body, but it is instead the interplay of brain/body/environment. No matter how identical a copy might be, if it is in a different location, it is in a different environment, so it should be trivially easy to tell which was the original and which is the copy.
Of course this is a thought experiment which has occured to many people over the years, and was subverted many years by the writer of the Star Trek episode 'What Are Little Girls Made Of?’ (the excellent Robert Bloch, of Psycho fame). Bloch has Kirk duplicated while strapped to a spinning roulette wheel arrangement, so that no-one - not even he - can be sure which one is in the original location. Dizzy from his roulette-wheel duplication, Kirk should have been unable to determine if he was the original or the copy.
In the event the copy was imperfect, or we would have been stuck with two William Shatners for the rest of the series. But if the copy had been accurate, no-one could have told the difference- unless they used a high-speed camera during the duplication process, of course.
That “presumably” gives away how you are begging the entire question. Your argument amounts to saying that your view that the rest of the body makes no essential contribution to consciousness follows from the presumption that the rest of the body makes no essential contribution to consciousness. An awful lot of dubious assumptions are hidden away in that “properly hooked up” too. The issue of “proper” hook up is a lot less straightforward than you might think. Try reading that article I gave you a link to. You might learn something.
I don’t know how you are getting this from what I said at all. 100% of the population have bodies (as well as brains), so, from my perspective, they all have the capacity to be self aware and intelligent. Most utilize that capacity.
People with locked in syndrome have (most of) their voluntary muscles paralyzed, but they still do have bodies most of whose functions continue to operate normally. Their sense organs continue to function, and their brains are still connected to their bodies in a myriad of ways, via huge numbers of afferent and efferent nerves, and via blood borne chemicals. What is more, most of them (and perhaps all for whom we actually have clear evidence of consciousness) can still move their eyes, and eye movements are very possibly the component of non-neural bodily functioning that contribute most to consciousness. (See, for instance, the work of J.K. O’Regan and Alva Noë, here, here, here and here.) Indeed, considering that most human actions are eye movements (what they lack in amplitude, they more than make up for in frequency), locked in syndrome does not reduce the amount even of voluntary bodily activity nearly as much as it superficially appears to.
Well, :rolleyes: to you too! What do you think a brain cell is? It is basically a bag of chemicals, all busily moving about and interacting, some of them ionized. How does it function? Basically as a complex electrical switch, rather like a transistor except with multiple inputs contributing to the control of its output. How do any of the structural or functional properties of the brain cell give rise to consciousness? Nobody fucking well knows, much less you, and, more to the point, not even those who have devoted their lives to trying to understand it. To insist that brain cells must somehow, in themselves (or en masse) be able to produce consciousness, even though nothing of what we actually know about their properties, structure, or functioning provides any clue about how they might be able to do so, is to attribute magical properties to them, properties that we don’t understand, and that are different in kind from any that such cells, or anything else short of an entire living animal, have ever been observed to have. The insistence that the entire secret to consciousness must lay deep within the brain, in the properties and interactions of brain cells, and that no other biological facts are relevant, is not a matter of empirically based science but of dogmatic faith in a theoretical framework that has been failing to explain consciousness since the seventeenth century. Amongst actual neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, that faith has progressively been breaking down over the last 30 years or so as evidence has accumulated for the ineliminable role of the rest of the body, and its interaction with the environment, in both cognition and consciousness.
More accurately: we don’t care whether it’s the same instance. Whether you call it moving one instance, or call it making a new instance that is a perfect copy, is just a matter of personal taste and makes no actual difference.
If the program had subjective experience however, then it would make a difference. And it would open up all the same philosophical questions as with the brain.
And, again, contrary to popular belief, we don’t know that the brain is a computer / program. We only know right now that it is a machine.
To conclude from the vanishing of quantum effects on large scales that it is explanatorily irrelevant on those scales, as well, is I think a popular fallacy—the analogous reasoning would hold that it isn’t needed to explain the properties of matter either, but here we know precisely that it does, and how.
Take, for instance, the extendedness of matter, which Descartes held to be its basic property, even calling it ‘res extensa’. Ultimately, this is explained by the Pauli principle, that no two matter particles can occupy the same state, and therefore, the same location, which is in turn explained by the antisymmetry of their wave functions under particle exchange. So quantum physics is needed to explain the macroscopic properties of matter; and personally, I don’t think it should be surprising if it was needed for the ‘macroscopic’ properties of consciousness, as well. Maybe it can do for the ‘res cogitans’ what it did for the ‘res extensa’!
In fact, I think that the idea of complementarity can be made to do some work here: complementarity essentially refers to the feature of quantum mechanics that you need inconsistent classical pictures to describe the behaviour of a quantum system under different circumstances, for instance, a wave-like or particle-like description—you can’t simultaneously apply both, and you can’t do away with either. This is, I think, a more interesting relationship between mind and matter to explore than mere supervenience, which has to cope with all kinds of well known problems.