Well, current science’s myopic view of reality has been able to associate particular areas of the brain with assorted very specific functions of memory, emotion, reasoning, and expression. If those areas are stimulated or damaged, people’s minds and personalities can be changed in all sorts of unsettling ways. If “consciousness” is separated from memory, emotion, reasoning powers, or speech, what exactly is left of “consciousness”?
The concept of consciousness is purely a metaphor. Heck, the volcano erupts or a 9.5 Richter scale earthquake comes and turns you into ashes in seconds. Where the hell was your consciousness? The meteor comes at the speed of light and hits/destroys the planet. Where on earth was your consciousness? The sun will disintegrate like all other stars do. Where is your consciousness about that? And what on earth are you doing about it NOW? – Nothing.
I am amazed by the egocentric snails (called 2001 human beings) that call scientific analysis of brain “a myopic view of consciousness”. Hey, wake up. Recognize that we are only in year 2001 AD believing in superstitious cave man ideas of “God and religion”. What impertinence to think that we are in year 2,000,001, having evolved to a superior brain that shall be aware of firing of each neuron in its own brain, let alone the inner workings of the planet earth currently capable of destroying millions of these little “conscious minds” with a mere hiccup.
Let’s first admit our own ignorance of the workings of the brain before philosophizing about its “consciousness”.
Conclusion: Push your congress person to allocate funds into scientific brain research (in parallel with NASA) so that our future generations can soon address themselves to real issues confronting this planet rather than sitting behind a computer terminal contemplating their navels on metaphors.
Good answer, One Cell.
I’ll never understand why some people are so uncomfortable with the answer “we don’t know yet” that they will choose a guess (seemingly at random, because they will admit their is no evidence for it) and decide it must be true.
As others have indicated, Daniel Dennett is one of the foremost philosophers of consciousness working today. I find his work extremely congenial to my way of thinking about and understanding the world.
He did a reasonably good job of boiling down his ideas about consciousness and conveying them for the general reader in Kinds of Minds : Towards an Understanding of Consciousness (Science Masters Series). There’s nothing new in it for someone familiar with Dennett’s other work, but it does make an excellent introduction to the subject. Dennett writes well and it’s a small and fairly quick read. One could do a lot worse in exploring the question of the OP than by starting here.
I second the recommendation of Dennet, though I prefer Consciousness Explained over Kinds of Minds. While I don’t necesarily agree entirely with his position, I find his presentation to be both interesting and generally fair. Of course, the very best element of Dennet’s view has to be the name. Pandemonium Theory How can you not love such a fitting label for human consciousness. The symmetry of cause and effect is simply sublime.
For an entirely different interpretation of the current state of cognitive neuroscience, I recommend Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis.
Are you claiming science doesn’t understand what causes a volcano to erupt or an earthquake to happen? That would be news to me.
We understand chemistry and physics. As such, we certaintly understand the workings of the brain down to the atomic scale.
Ah, one of the great questions that plague mankind. I commend the original poster for raising such an interesting issue.
First of all, the answer from psychology is: We dunno.
As other folks have mentioned theories about, perhaps the leading one these days being the biological/neurological hypothesis. Definately there is a clear and established link between brain and consciousness. Get hit in the wrong area of the brain and your consciousness changes. However the links between brain areas and consciousness are not always that great (one of the other posters dangerously overestimated the effect sizes of most of these studies) and often make causal inferences that are not warranted. For instance if you do research that finds that a particular area of the brain activates when you are angry (the amygdala, say) does this mean that the amygdala activates then you become angry, or do you become angry, which activates the amygdala. That, we dunno.
Also some folks assume the science only demonstrates a deterministic view of human behavior (the assumptions underlying positivist science are deterministic, so it is difficult for it not to), however some scientific evidence does suggest we have a considerable amount of free will. Those who are interested should consult the work of Rychlak for one.
Another interesting point was raised by the French philosopher REnouvier. He said that if it is true that our behavior is determined (as science suggests) then our beliefs in science itself our determined and thus not objective. Without free will we have no way of objectively considering scientific data. Science itself could very well be determined to be completely wrong and we would have no idea. I am probably not summing this line of reasoning very well, but bear with me.
In relation to brain and mind, there are many who believe that the brain is merely a recepticle for consciousness, not the cause. This would be likened unto a glass of water. Break the glass, the water disappears, but the glass is not the CAUSE of the water. This view helps to understand how a dualistic view of mind/brain could be possible.
Let us remember that we do not understand the workings of the brain particularly well, and research into brain function is often highly chaotic and contradictory (as is research in many sciences, including physics, which one poster suggested we understood well).
In psychology we still argue over consciousness and free will. As many know, BF Skinner held for many years that consciousness and free will were illusions, and we were little more than machines. His theories have generally gone out of favor, though many still favor cognitive or neurologically deterministic theories.
So we still don’t really have an answer to this question, but it is fun trying to figure it out.
All these posts and no one has mentioned Cecil Adams’ own word on the subject. Sheesh!
Anyway, he says that an entity is conscious if it is capable of learning and is aware of itself and its surroundings. But he also says no one really knows how consciousnes arises. All we can be sure of it that it originates in the brain.
jmullaney
I am sorry to have to bring you the bad news.
You have been busy since October 1999 posting thousands of long and often tiresome messages to over 2,300 threads in this forum. We thank you for your diligent contribution, and we now know very well your views on almost every subject. Have you considered retiring for a while and perhaps study some of these subjects in a little more detail and depth before you come back again to the forum armed with fresh, stimulating and innovative views backed by solid references.
I say this because of the last jewel you flashed on 6 April 2001, saying:
We understand chemistry and physics. As such, we certainly understand the workings of the brain down to the atomic scale.
Wow, what can I say? Except that you are completely out of it.
First of all, in a scale of 1 to 10 (where 10 is everything there is to know about physics and chemistry), where is the current state of human understanding of physics and chemistry? Do you think it is near 1, somewhere at the middle, or near 10?
Secondly, as of today, the entire world’s brain research community does not know how many cells (neurons) are in the human brain. It could be anywhere between 10 billion to 100 billion. For an up-to-date state of research on this important yet unresolved issue see http://nervenet.org/papers/3Dcounting.html#Introduction
Now, if we do not even know how many brain cells we have, how could we possibly understand the workings of the brain?
jmullaney. Please re-examine your state of credibility and back-up references prior to filling up the threads with proclamations. I know you really enjoy “debating”, but please have pity on our eyes, having to scroll down through reams and reams of quotes, unquote, and unnecessary long and baseless comments.
This is typically known as the fallacy of wishful thinking, further complicated by a few other fallacies, such as the use of jargon. What is a “spiritual component”? In using a common word like “spiritual,” are you violating Occam’s Razor by postulating characteristics of the “spiritual component” which are not demanded by its (admittedly already fallacious) connection to free will?
-Ben
What we are looking for is what is looking
?There is a problem with dualism as described by this analogy. If I break a glass, ALL the water will drain out. But you can “break” the brain in ways that only parts of consciousness will be missing. To reconcile this, a dualist view would have to believe that the brain is mirrored in both form and function by something (spirit, or whatever you want to call it). But if that is the case then you may as well say that brain (which is obviously composed of matter) and spirit are one and the same.
The same reasoning explains why we no longer need resort to phlogiston to explain fire.
Do you mean “partly conscious”? I think that generally applies to someone who is only conscious part of the time and unconscious the rest. No matter how mangled your brain, you are either conscious or not (even dreaming is a form of being conscious, aware). How can awareness be divided?
Damage to specific regions of the brain can cause changes in personality (emotional make-up), loss of specific cognitive abilities (language, ability to process specific sorts of information, including bizarre stuff like no longer recognizing your own limbs as parts of you), and memory disorders ranging from simple amnesia to really weird stuff. (I just saw Memento this weekend, where the protagonist has suffered a brain injury and can no longer form new memories–he knows who he is and the details of the first part of his life, but he’ll introduce himself to you every time he sees you and not remember meeting you yesterday or an hour ago; granted, it’s not exactly a documentary, but I’ve read descriptions by Oliver Sacks and people like that of things just as weird.)
Over at jmullaney’s Gnosticism thread at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=66376 we’ve gotten a bit off-track, and this seemed like a more appropriate place for the following…
The context: Spiritus Mundi and I are debating David Chalmers’ theory of consciousness, which was briefly touched on earlier in this thread. In defending Chalmers, I posited that science’s biggest failing when it comes to consciousness is its inherent, insurmountable inability to explain why we actually experience conscious phenomena/qualia/stuff at all…
Hmm. Actually, I thought I posted something in this thread a little bit ago, but apaprently it didn’t take. Still, seems as good a time as any to pop in.
I do not see that consciousness must exist at all, mainly because I don’t see that free will must exist at all. Even if, though, free will did exist I don’t think it implies consciousness either.
The question is one that seems, to me, to reduce itself away to meaninglessness. What is consciousness? Self-awareness. Self-awareness of what? Of your memories, which are previous experiences. Of your current senses, which are actually just integrated memories (since we aren’t, so far as I know, simultaneously aware of everything instintaneously). In fact, I might even go so far as to say that what we intuitively call the present is actually just the recent past.
But fine, you say. A vague bundle of sensory perceptors can perceive itself. Well, to be sure. I can make my tv-camcorder combination (if I had a camcorder, that is…do they still even call them camcorders?) sense itself as well. So perhaps what we need is sometihng more than mere self-perception.
How about self-awareness? Hmm. But self awareness of something more than past memories, since that was what led us into the tv-camcorder scenario. As Douglas Hofstader said, and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing, “We know; but not only that, we know that we know, and we know that we know that we know, etc.” So to make my tv-camcorder conscious I must have a display that says “this is me” every time I point it at itself.
No, that can’t be right either. It needs a VCR to record its perceptions to match memory. It needs conditional responses based soley upon contexts involving itself. It needs an ability to…um, do what?
Unfortunately I am being asked to leave right now and “cheer someone up,” though probably not by telling her she isn’t really conscious of anything. More later.
Defining what we mean by consciousness is probably the biggest obstacle we face in ever figuring out what it is/where it comes from.
Given that… Aynrandlover, I’m not so sure I’d define consciousness as “self-awareness”; “awareness” sees to work just fine. Once you start talking about self-awareness, more complicated, more “human” issues come up—the Hofstadter “we know that we know that we know” type stuff. Dogs may or may not have self-aware consciousnesses (“Right now, I am pondering my own ability to realize that I am aware of myself being aware”) but it seems quite likely that they are conscious beings. I’m sure that’s a debate in and of itself, but it is really a necessarily prologue to any debate on human consciousness.
Now if the debate here is actually about where our higher-level, “human” consciousness comes from, that’s a different story. But in any case, it would be helpful to know more about elementary consciousnesses first.
Given MEBuckner’s comments, it would also seem that memories are not a necessary component of consciousness, contrary to your suggestion.
I intuitively agree with you that what we call the present is actually just the recent past—or more specifically, that our “consciousness” at any moment believes itself to be dwelling in a slightly earlier moment. But does this necessarily affect the “legitimacy” of consciousness? I don’t see how.
No. There are many forms of aphasia which leave people “partly conscious”. For example, some aphasia sufferers may, when shown a pencil, say they do not know what it is. If asked to write what it is called, they will have no trouble writing the word “pencil”. Consciousness is a lot more complex than simply being either aware or not aware.
But what would it be like to be “conscious”, but have no memories? Or to be “conscious” without experiencing emotions? We might intellectually discuss such propositions, but it’s very hard to grasp what they would mean as experiences. To me, my memories and emotions are are vital part of my “self”. And there’s lots of clinical evidence that memory, emotion, and cognitive functions are all organically based.
MEBuckner: What would it be like to be conscious without having any conscious access to memories? It would suck, to be sure (though hell, every moment would be an adventure!). To be conscious without having emotions? Ask my boss (ha ha).
Seriously, though, it is quite difficult to imagine what conscious experience would be like without memories or emotions; yet that is what we must do to understand consciousness more fully.
Taking away the memories isn’t that hard to do—simply contemplate any time you’ve been conscious and haven’t dwelled on any events of the past (when you hit the brakes and flipped the bird at the red-light runner you saw this morning, etc.). In the long run, memories are great to have, but in the short run, they aren’t essential to being in a “conscious state.”
Emotions? Again, I think we’re getting into the human element here. Emotions tend to be reactions to experienced events, either post or prior. For example, I consciously experience being punched in the stomach; a few seconds later, the anger and humiliation kicks in—does that mean I did not experience the initial punch?.
I’m not saying that emotions aren’t a part of the sophisticated human consciousness, just that they aren’t necessary to a BASIC consciousness (which, it seems to me, is the best place to start an argument on consciousness). In other words, “Feel angry about punch” is a level of consciousness above “Feel punch.” The question is, why do we feel the punch at all? Why is it necessary for us to have ANY experiences, when we could theoretically perform just as well as automatons?
In case anyone doubts the automaton possibility, I can tell you from personal experience that it is possible. The following story is entirely true, has always haunted me and has surely contributed to my interest in topics such as these…
When I was nine years old, I had a day where I experienced no experience—about 30 minutes into my school day, my consciousness quickly faded out and disappeared. When it reappeared, there were about 10 minutes before the end of the school day.
Upon “waking up,” I had no (and I mean NO) memories of anything that had happened that day, and to the best of my knowledge I did not have any conscious experience of any of the events which occured while I was “unconscious.” I came to in the middle of a math test, having written down answers for about 3/4 of the questions but having, again, absolutely no memory of having done so (as it turns out, most of the answers were wrong—way wrong. Imagine the difficulty in convincing my teacher to let me retake the test because I had been “absent” that day…)
As far as I could tell upon coming to, I had been asleep all day. Yet clearly this could not have been possible—not only had I clearly been writing down answers to the test, but somehow NOBODY noticed anything strange (ie sleepwalking) about me.
Indeed, my behavior, frighteningly, had not altered significantly enough for anyone around me to notice that I no longer had a “conscious mental space”—my senses clearly were working, as I could see walls and thus avoid walking into them, hear the bell notifying us that it was time for gym class, etc.
My best friend told me that I had been “quiet” that day, and had uncharacteristically defended myself physically against a playground bully; yet ultimately neither he nor anyone else had even an inkling of what was (or, more appropriately, wasn’t) going on in my head that day.
Julian Jaynes fans, take note: did I become, for a moment, bicameral? Who knows. But something very strange did happen. With enough time, probably somebody would have noticed that the change in my personality from intellectual teacher’s pet to math-impaired schoolyard brawler. But that day, at least, I played out some of the terrible consequences of cogito ergo sum, and it was positively a life-changing experience.