Consciousness and Reality

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Actually no.

I said "My background of knowledge suggests the opposite. Look into Dan Dennett. <link>"

None of that is an appeal to authority. I made a claim about things I knew. I pointed to a person who could provide this knowledge. I provided a link. Even if instead of phrasing this the way I did, I phrased it to emphasize Dan Dennett's knowledge, the issue is that Dan Dennett is a major philosopher of mind anyway, so appealing to Dan Dennett's knowledge is not wrong, unless it takes the form "Dan Dennett said X, therefore X must be true".

Honestly, I'm suspicious. Here's the simple issue: NDE studies are not highly developed, and there is a tendency on the fringes of knowledge, even if there are legitimate pieces of knowledge, the simple issue is that they are not necessarily believable. So, as an example: in the multiple personality community, for awhile there were many many fantastic stories about the physical changes caused when the personalities shift, but none of these were believable, and it really looks like none of them were true.

With this, the problem is that with NDEs, we have a fringe group of researchers, often who are self-selected on the basis of their credulity to these ideas, making astounding claims, the kinds of claims parapsychologists tend to have made(and where parapsychologists are usually considered pseudoscientists). And where any theory that allows for mind-body dualism runs into TWO major problems(not really just one)
1) It's basically kind of like appealing to a miracle. There are mostly just anecdotes. There is probably no ability to form a reasonable theory to back up these ideas.
2) We end up having a *huge* problem with the "real immaterial essence" of a person, and the conflicting instantiation of that person across most other scientific studies, even unusual, and how the latter suggests the brain works.

So, one of the issues is that you can't really explain split-brain patients WITHOUT materialism. Split brain patients have their corpus collosum cut, and as a result, the two halves of the brain engage in a lot of independent action, and even form beliefs independently. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFJPtVRlI64 (In the video a neuroscientist discusses how one half of the brain is theist, and the other half atheist) The problem is that if the source of consciousness were immaterial, then assuming the constancy of the immaterial self(despite divisions in the material body), we should see very very massive discrepancies with conscious experience, not just the split continuity that we do see.

Another issue is just that whatever an immaterial consciousness is, it has to (arbitrarily) favor certain parts of the brain over others when gathering its immaterial consciousness, simply because of research in blindsight, and so many other phenomena, where some parts of the brain know something that the consciousness does not have access to. The issue is that this simply does not make much sense, and it's hard to come up with any reasonable immaterial notion as to why this may be.(which is why I said it was arbitrary)

I mean, now one can argue that neither type of concern really disproves NDEs, but both concerns reduce the plausibility of NDEs and their ability to reconcile with other pieces of our background knowledge. I mean, the long-story-short is that weird experiences happen, weird claims spontaneously occur, and these claims may be hard to explain away. They may be statistical anomalies, errors where people's memories warp after the fact, issues where the witnesses make inferential leaps or even cause a feedback loop(see the case of Clever Hans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans ). Trying to work out what happened after the fact is a cold trail though in most cases. The issue is that if we have a lot of weird claims that are simply not NDEs, then we should have an expectancy of errors. (And it must be noted that with NDEs there are skeptics of the more spectacular claims in the field, like Susan Blackmore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Blackmore who has worked on parapsychology and through that research became a skeptic on it)


Nothing, because wave function collapse is too quick for conscious awareness:
http://pre.aps.org/abstract/PRE/v61/i4/p4194_1
"Based on a calculation of neural decoherence rates, we argue that the degrees of freedom of the human brain that relate to cognitive processes should be thought of as a classical rather than quantum system, i.e., that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current classical approach to neural network simulations. We find that the decoherence time scales (∼10-13–10-20s) are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical time scales (∼10-3–10-1s), both for regular neuron firing and for kinklike polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way."

A lot of the skepticism towards quantum consciousness is because quantum events are too fast to meaningfully play a role. Often the association is seen as "consciousness is weird, quantum events are weird, let's try to link the two".

That's pretty much sums up what I was telling myself for several years; that it was conjecture, people getting excited, the wrong people with their hands on the data, that the human mind is terrible on accuracy, that its gotta be the brain asphyxiating, etc. etc..

The trouble I ran into with that or sticking to the Blackmore outlook; there's a point where anecdote gets too thick, conspiracy (either conspiracy or mass accidental self-delusion) overruns its mileage, and at this point I'm simply more inclined to say let them keep doing the research.


I don't buy into the microtubule theory either - the scale seems like too big of a leap.

I had hoped this discussion could be farther reaching. You will probably know that Penrose and Wheeler went a lot farther down the road that I imagine will be derided by skeptics. They see the quantum science applied to consciousness and reality as having profound implications. The two are linked. According to Wheeler humans are not observers of reality so much as participators.

Leaving that theory behind, if it is actually a theory, let me mention some more immediate things which happen on a regular basis. It would seem that consciousness reaches out beyond the confines of the body. There are people who are gifted such that they can in effect see behind walls, know who is standing behind them if that person is familar, there is the case of same DNA twins, it is possible to know people's hidden emotions, if that person has a cold or flu and it is not possible to attribute all these things to the five senses.

Consciousness may dwell inside the brain, but what we are conscious of is quite another matter.

Heh, I can kind of understand it's just that if you look around, there are SO MANY seemingly incompatible stories involving absurd claims. Like, the Christians will tell you that you run into that problem with the resurrection of their Messiah. The Mormons will tell you that there is little reason to doubt the witnesses of the angel Moroni and the golden tablets. Hindus will argue that there are verifiable instances of people who have lived on nothing but air and remained in good health. Spiritual healings cross cultures, and even in the West can stretch as far as Benny Hinn to the occurrences at Lourdes, and every religion subsists on its verified miracles, many of which claim to have mass witnesses. Even UFO citings can often have multiple people involved. At some point, I end up feeling that the very category must be infected with some human absurdity, and as such I feel like anything involving UFOs, spirits, miracles, etc, has to be held to some very high standards.

With NDEs, I'd have to wait until it was common knowledge amongst the psychological/neuroscientific community that supernatural causation was needed in a theory of mind, simply because there is too much noise favoring the spiritualism we want to believe in so many other instances.

Honestly, I think that the "consciousness a participant of reality" sounds absurd. It's hard to make up an account where this reconciles with ALL of our evidence. I mean, how would this creature evolve? If not evolve, then what spiritual force would have this interest and is there other attesting facts to this? Can we create good explanatory models involving this participation and involving the cause of us being participatory beings. Part of the issue is that parapsychology, has never really gotten any real scientific support and is still widely considered pseudoscience. The evidences cited are usually anecdotes, and yeah... I don't trust anecdotes of this sort. I mean, a magician can give BRILLIANT anecdotal evidence of wondrous claims so long as nobody knows the trick. Attempts at studies are often not reproduced, or do not find results.

Also, "hidden emotions" are likely badly hidden. The issue is that the very experience of an emotion often involves experiencing physiological facts related to that emotion, and these physiological facts are not always easy to perfectly hide to others either. I mean, like with Clever Hans, a small cue can make a huge difference in how a being behaves, as the mere small expectation was enough of a cue for Hans to know when to stop stomping his hoof. Human beings are a species that was evolved to pick up on every subtlety, as we are the social experts of all animals and no other creature politics as adeptly as we do.

I mean, maybe I am just the skeptic, but skepticism is warranted given the large number of claims that would easily be put in a similarly distrusted category that we count as knowledge to consider false.

I get where you're coming from and the good news - there are some pretty big studies right now being done with this and hopefully there will be some closure either way regarding whether this is happening chemically or by means that we don't currently understand.

Hi awesome, I do tend to get asking questions which cannot be answered. However, I have to come to place where I ask, is this actually working out for me. My childhood was not very happy and that was probably due to what I was. No use trying to blame people. Giving my life to God brought struggles, again because of what I was. I wanted to be of some use to this world and too obviously hiding inside myself wasn't going to get me far. The hypersensitive me had to come out into the light of day and that was painful. However, I gradually found a good spiritual experience. A very deep abiding spiritual peace enabled me to overcome fear and neurosis. I found the strength to grasp the nettle and become mature. Other people can say they did all of that without faith, but I never would have been able. I had read self help books, but could never make them work for me.

I don't see how this is true in any sense. Humans, at least, are conscious, and we are self aware. We are aware that we are conscious. We can think about the way that we think.

I would make a different analogy. Consciousness is like the software running on the computer (hardware) of the brain. In fact, I would go one step further. It is true that computers do not currently have sentience, but I see no reason why they couldn't eventually, given the right hardware and software.

Rocky made really good point right their.

We can think about our own consciousness, but is it possible to be truly objective?

I wouldn't deny the possibility either. Trick is though, how would we ever tell a sentient being from a well built zombie? Wouldn't a zombie simply echo all the right answers and would that perhaps be the tell?

No, I agree that we can not. If that is what was meant, then I may have taken the analogy too literally.

Hmm if the zomibe was grunting and other zomibes knew what it was saying then Idk

A well built zombie (I would call it an android) would be visually indistinguishable from a human. One would then use the "Turing test" to attempt to determine organic vs inorganic. I don't want to derail this thread, but if someone wants to start another, I would be glad to participate. I am not sure I follow you about echoing the right answers. I would say that if it passes the Turing test, it might as well be human.

Rocky, I think threads can take new directions, or get stuck in the mud. I don't think a human like computer is on the way though. I did read about an AI computer taking about a quarter of an acre, It had the intelligence of a cockroach.