Here’s some info on those experiments, Bam Boo Gut
According to author James Jones in The Thin Red Line some things can live beyond death.
Describing a (fictional) bomb raid on transport ships at Guadalcanal Jones wrote:
Actually, all the atoms can change without the self changing. It’s the structure, the composition of the atoms which is important, not the identity of the atoms themselves.
Hobbes was living in the old Newtonian clockwork universe. My question really was whether there could be a brain complex enough to support C without it being C. I don’t think so myself.
A memory doesn’t produce anything, just records it. (Watching it must be part of recording). So, the memory cannot record broken into its components. I still think this is an example of a combination of things having a property the individual components do not have.
It is certainly not clear that our entire brain is involved in all thoughts - so our brain as a whole does watch the entire movie, as it were, while the components only see parts. However my example does not consist of individual gates with different functions - the entire memory cell is involved in “remembering” the bit. One bit cannot be broken, so this is provably true. Maybe it is more like a scene in a movie with a bunch of actors - you don’t have a scene (considered atomic here) without all the actors, though no one actor has all the lines.
I agree with you here. I think that the thought process may be associated with C, but is not C., so different definitions seem reasonable.
You should check out Spook by Mary Roach, which is an entire book on the search for life after death, and describes the experiment on weighing the soul (and followups) in detail. Suffice to say there were problems with the methodology and it has not been reproduced. Warning: she is a skeptic. Warning 2: she is hilarious. (She also wrote Stiff about what is done with bodies, which is good too, but I liked Spook better.)
The act of dying could burn some calories and that would explain the weight difference. What does Life weigh? Death is life leaving the body. The brain waves do not have anymore electricity and do not register. Since a soul is immaterial, how could it be weighed?
Monavis
The difference between life and a soul is that life is the mechanical portion of your being; the heart pumping, electricity coursing, blood flowing. A soul is the personality that separates us from fish and bacteria. You can have life without a soul, but you can’t have a soul without life.
Thanks Revtim - great link!
Not if “you” are a single atom, as I’m trying to prove (the “point” c. has to go through to be experienced at once, and not fragmentary).
Neither do I, as the quote by Hobbes should firmly state.
Again, you’re not responding to what I wrote, but what you think I wrote. My entire point here is that you can not experience any more information than you recieve, so for ONE self/ person/ consciousness/ atom/ whatever to experience something, that ONE something has to recieve all that information by itself. YOU are that one, thus, everything you experience must pass through some single point.
Completely irrelevant. I do not think our brain only handles one thought at a time or anything along those lines, I’m only trying to set up an analogy here.
Wonderful.
That is a matter of faith not fact.
Monavis
Well, I’m faithless. And I’m not using the word “soul” in the religious sense. I’m using it in the secular sense because I believe it has evolved into a secular term. The believers no longer own it. Which is nice. I thank James Brown. 
If you could provide another word for what I’m referring to, I’d be happy to adopt it.
“You cannot experience any more information than you receive.” Don’t you ever daydream? We can experience things that we make up internally, that we synthesize. We create information, so I don’t agree with this at all.
“YOU are that one, thus, everything you experience must pass through some single point.”
What single point? Is the point the brain? If so, I agree. If it is a component of the brain, I don’t agree. No neuron or even part of the brain experiences everything. Our C, as far as I can guess, consists at least in part of parts of the brain communicating.
Now, clearly not every atom of the brain experiences everything (whatever experience means) since each atom cannot physically store that much information. Is there one atom somewhere that you are referring to? If so, where? We know that removing various parts of the brain have various effects - but I know of no small chunk (of atomic size - Greek meaning) which is fatal in your sense. It’s time for you to provide some evidence.
Basically, your hypothesis, as far as I can tell, is not supported by neurological research. It’s not particularly logical either. I’ve demonstrated that a group of objects can have a property that none of the objects in the group alone have. Now you demonstrate that there is a critical atomic object in the brain.
Look, we’ve agreed c. and “the stuff of c.” are not the same. If, now, the c. is analogous to a computer screen, and daydream, to some program running on that screen, c. needs to receive it to show it, but the computer (analogous then, to the brain), does not need to receive it, as you say.
When you say c. doesn’t need to “receive” a daydream, because it makes it up itself, you’re obviously still mixing the screen and the computer (c. and brain, thoughts, “stuff of c”, what have you).
Let’s say you “are” your entire brain. I’ll remove a non-vital percent of that brain. You are still one “person” (or rather, “consciousness”), not 0.99% of a consciousness. Thus, if by removing parts of your brain (which happens all the time, as neurons die), your consciousness doesn’t somehow “shrink”, that c. must belong to a part of the brain that wasn’t touched, and not the brain as a whole.
Now, before you go on saying that consciousness does indeed “shrink” when we lose bits of our brains, because our brain activity is harmed, I’ll remind you that brain activity =/= c. as per the definition we’ve now agreed upon. Think again of the screen; it shows the same number of pixels, with the same range of colours, even if the computer is damaged (normally, which will do for the analogy). Even if somehow half your HD space disappears into The Void, you still have One Screen.
Or, let’s try another angle: Explain how “half a consciousness” works. (Hint: by our definition, it becomes "Experiencing half of what one experiences)
As far as logic evidence goes, I believe all I’m expected to do is not being able to figure out a single way it could have been that would contradict my theory. And, as assumed in my previous paragraph, I’ve rather a hard time figuring out a concept of a “divisible consciousness”. If consciousness is indivisible, it might as well belong to an indivisible atom.
Neurological research means nothing to my hypothesis, that’s what I’ve been trying to say all the time. It’s NOT a brain hypothesis, it’s a consciousness hypothesis. Logics of assuming that consciousness can not be an emergent property above. I’ve agreed to all your demonstrations, but I’ve also held that they’re utterly irrelevant.
What makes James Brown an authority? There is no proof of a soul in human or any living thing. Soul can be anything one wants to believe it is.
Monavis
You obviously aren’t tracking with me. There is an essence, or personality, if you will, in human beings and other higher animals. It’s not a “thing.” It doesn’t travel out of the body, it is incapable of reconstituting itself in another living thing. That is the part of a person’s being that most people refer to as “the soul” of that person. It has nothing to do with religion. Never did (though some might like to think so).
The James Brown thing was a little humor, which evidently went over your head. He is widely recognized as “The Godfather of Soul.” Get it?
The screen analogy is particularly bad here, since the value of a screen is more or less directly proportional to the number of working pixels. There will always be a few out with no difficulty, and no one would say a screen is working if only a dozen pixels are. It is somewhere in between.
However, for the brain, various aspects of C can be destroyed by damaging certain regions of the brain - for instance the recognition of faces, which certainly falls under experience. You either experience something or you don’t, but different regions of the brain control different types of experiences.
That is an example of how neurology is relevant - it maps different parts of the brain to the ability to experience different things.
First, I don’t agree that C is indivisible. But if the part of the brain related to C consists of many atoms, I don’t agree that even an indivisible C implies that it belongs to an atom - just as the indivisible memory cell does not imply that its components have memories.
So here we get back to the OP. Does it not being a brain hypothesis mean that C is not connected to the brain in any way? I didn’t think this was what you were saying. If it is, then removing an atom or set of atoms should also remove C.
It did indeed since I have no interest in soul music. Soul then would be personality as I understand your discription, and dies with the body, which in turn goes back to being the atoms etc. that was it’s make up.
Monavis
Well, not exactly, as it was never “alive” to begin with. It just “is.” A person’s soul can disappear before the body dies. It is the result of certain electrical impulses in the brain. Many bodies do indeed function with no personality. But no personality, or soul, functions without the body.
It’s an analogy. Analogies are by definition never perfect, but this one would work if you didn’t mess it up with irrelevant information. Normally, pixel quality is independent of computer content. I’m suggesting consciousness always IS, but can receive different input, ranging from the meaningless impulses a stone would receive, to the thoughts you are experiencing.
That’s changes in the brain, and thus c. input, not c. itself.
To be short, if C isn’t indivisible, “I” is only an approximation, and should be replaced by “us”.
Removing most single atoms would not change (the input of) c. more than it changes the brain. We can safely agree this is utterly negligable. However, my supposition is that one of these atoms IS you. Removing it (not as ending it’s existence, but physically moving it) would not end your consciousness, it would only be removed from the meaningful input from “your” brain.
Now that I didn’t get, and this explains all your other points. This I disagree with most emphatically. I see C, however you define it, as a process running in the brain. Any sort of analysis or awareness or display requires energy and a base of matter to interact with. Where is this in a rock? How can you distinguish a rock without C from a rock with C?
Your concept is physically impossible, and indistinguishable from the tradition of a soul as a massless entity flitting about without the need for energy and inhabiting trees and dogs and people. I’m afraid there is nothing here at all.
Bolding mine
How are you ever planning to understand anyone when you use your definitions to interpret a word they’ve explicitly stated they interpret otherwise? You may disagree with my definition, but I’m stealing c. because I’ve no other words to use, and I thought we’d agreed upon my definition. I’ve argued countless times why I think it is a good definition, too. By saying my definition of c. doesn’t count, you’re basically saying that you can apply any meaning you desire to what I say. When I say “C. is in all things”, it doesn’t mean “consciousness-by-Voyager’s-definition is in all things”, and it most definately ISN’T, it means “consciousness-by-my-definition is in all things.”.
Also, by my hypothesis, you can’t distinguish a rock without c. (“potential-for-c.”) from a rock without, because there are no rocks without c. This isn’t some treehugger-philosophy about all life being sacred and capable of thought and feelings, it simply means that since I believe that in order for c. to be experienced, it must be experienced by one, since if it is experienced by many, it is also experienced by one+one+one, etc, and that one is by definition indivisible, and so it could not be anything other than what it is, because it hasn’t got smaller parts to define the difference between c. and not-c.
I’ll repeat.
You’re saying consciousness (by both of our definitions) is an emergent quality, and you defend your position in part by refering to other emergent qualities, like memory. However, you’re missing a vital point. Memory in a computer chip doesn’t exist, except as an interpretation of the state of the chip. To use an example more easy to grasp, say you bake a cake. The “cake” is only the idea people get when they experience it, in reality, it’s flour, milk, sugar, what have you, which in turn are only ideas of different molecules. They have different attributes, sure, but noone can “be” sugar, since sugar is many (atoms, both greek and chemical sense). But! You can indeed be conscious, and for many to experience something, each one of the many must experience it, while for many to build a pyramid, they need only build a part of the pyramid each. The way I see it, c. is thus principally different from everything else you might claim to be emergent properties. I thus see it as a neccesarily founding attribute, and as such, it must belong to atoms (back to greek, I’m sure you’ve guessed)
As I implied, fuck treehuggers. How’s that for a distinction? If I disagree strongly with the theorists you’re confusing me with, doesn’t that imply a misunderstanding on your behalf? Keep digging, you’re not there yet.