Why Can't The World's Greatest Scientists Solve The Consciousness Riddle

haidut

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Maybe because they don't read Ray Peat:):
At least, it is refreshing to read that science is finally admitting it does not know much about consciousness despite decades of misguided "studies" and assurance that it is getting very close to solving the "riddle". Can't get on the right track without admitting first you were wrong.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015 ... sciousness

"...Though he didn’t realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it."

"...The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser, I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. “He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.”
 
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narouz

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Thanks, haidut.
It is a very complex concept.
One of the coolest and most illuminating things I've read about consciousness
is in an obscure book by Julian Jaynes,
"The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."

And another book, sortuv a companion book in my mind to the one above,
is A.N. Whitehead's "Science and the Modern World."
This book really resonated with another of your recent postings
about life in the universe being purposeful vs random.
 

pboy

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consciousness is so weird to me, because its clearly something beyond just the physical and chemical laws of life...like theres no way to open a brain and find where memories are or what language you speak or anything...but at the same time, physical and chemical health affects clarity and wakefulness of consciousness....its like asking what is the meaning of life! Perhaps no living being will ever really know for sure
 

Gl;itch.e

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pboy said:
consciousness is so weird to me, because its clearly something beyond just the physical and chemical laws of life...like theres no way to open a brain and find where memories are or what language you speak or anything...but at the same time, physical and chemical health affects clarity and wakefulness of consciousness....its like asking what is the meaning of life! Perhaps no living being will ever really know for sure
Those ideas are why I've always thought of the brain like a receiver
 

Sheik

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Couldn't it be said that everything we know is something we know about consciousness? I think we know a lot about consciousness.

I also think that with technology we WILL be able to locate memories and stuff in the brain, whether or not our monkey brains can grasp how it works.

But science can never touch the conscious presence within us. Any idea about it is just an idea, and not consciousness itself. What kind of answer are we even looking for? Maybe the question is just a reflection of the fact that our approach to life is to assume lack. Maybe we're really just animals looking for fulfillment and calling it science.

The intellect is like a sandbox where we draw pictures with a stick. Then there is also have the outer world where we communicate with sounds, body language, etc.. But we're demanding that a stick drawing capture sound, words, love, etc.. But it's fundamentally incapable of that. Sound cannot exist within a drawing.

Maybe we got into the habit of looking for external things to make us FEEL, and equating the THINGS with the feels themselves. But feels are feels, not stick drawings. We can't depend on stick drawings to make us feel love, satisfaction, or appreciation. Stop striving for satisfaction, and satisfaction is there.
 

Spokey

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I think the biggest obstacle in understanding consciousness is that it's conflated with so many other things like intelligence, memory, emotions, & perception (arguably a nebulous concept in itself). So you get scientists saying things like, 'this dog isn't conscious because it can't recognise it's own reflection'.

I remember watching a neuroscientists delightedly poke at drug users and meditators and so on because his brain scans revealed that when approaching the 'god state' or peak experience or whatever you want to call it, his subjects' brains revealed less activity rather than more. He didn't seem to know that for many of the 'travellers' this is exactly the point of the exercise, do nothing to see clearly the underlying nature of reality without all that grist from the intellect, preconceptions, pent up desires and such getting in the way. I don't know if he was conscious, but at least he seemed happy.

I'm reasonably certain that the brain does stuff and isn't just a passive antenna waiting for signals from 'out there' I think there are enough neural networks that do useful stuff out there that prove that isn't the case, but I feel they wont be really useful in explaining consciousness and I'd be reluctant to argue living things without brains or central nervous systems don't have a consciousness though it might be totally alien to our experience of the world.

If I built a machine that acted like a person, would it be conscious? I think it would personally. But if you took away all the things that made it act that way, would it be conscious then? I still think so. Perhaps there is no thing in existence that isn't. If consciousness is an innate property of matter or space and time, then it doesn't really need explaining. All the other things still do though. I usually stop talking at this point, because people often give me funny looks for seriously wondering if a grain of sand on the beach might have an experience of the world.
 

SaltGirl

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If any of you are following philosophy discussions that are going around you'll see that Panpsychism is slowly picking momentum. Seems to be more and more proponents of it in both philosophy and science. Of course, the frontman there is David Chalmers.

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/59
 

jaa

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pboy said:
consciousness is so weird to me, because its clearly something beyond just the physical and chemical laws of life...like theres no way to open a brain and find where memories are or what language you speak or anything...but at the same time, physical and chemical health affects clarity and wakefulness of consciousness....its like asking what is the meaning of life! Perhaps no living being will ever really know for sure

I disagree. It seems to me to be clearly based upon physical laws that can be traced all the way back to the first instances of life as our ability to model our environment grows every more complex. Organisms have gone from say detecting temperature or some other material changes to humans ability to not only create a model representation of the world based on our visible spectrum, sound, and touch, but we can also recall past events to better predict or model what will happen in the future to guide our decision making. There is still a long ways to go between humanity today and omnipotence, but I think it all exists within the physical world and don't see any good reason to complicate things with otherwordly ideas without evidence.
 

narouz

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from Julian Jaynes' book of 1976
The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
http://selfdefinition.org/psycholog...ss-in-the-Breakdown-of-the-Bicameral-Mind.pdf

INTRODUCTION
The Problem of Consciousness

O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this
insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences,
these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the
privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and
prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings,
and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries.
A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone,
questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden
hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we
have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself
than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is
myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all一
what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why?


CONTENTS
PREFAC E V
INTRODUCTION : TH E PROBLEM O F CONSCIOUSNESS I
Book I
The Mind of Man
1. The Consciousness of Consciousness 21
2. Consciousness 48
3. The Mind of Iliad 67
4. The Bicameral Mind 84
5. The Double Brain 100
6. The Origin of Civilization 126
Book II
The Witness of History
1. Gods, Graves, and Idols 149
2. Literate Bicameral Theocracies 176
3. The Causes of Consciousness 204
4. A Change of Mind in Mesopotamia 223
5. The Intellectual Consciousness of Greece 255
6. The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru 293
Book III
Vestiges of the Bicameral Mind in the Modern World
1. The Quest for Authorization 317
2. Of Prophets and Possession 339
3. Of Poetry and Music 361
4. Hypnosis 379
5. Schizophrenia 404
6. The Auguries of Science 433
AFTERWOR D 44 7
INDE X 47 1

----------

THE ORIGIN OF
CONSCIOUSNESS IN
THE BREAKDOWN
OF THE
BICAMERAL
MIND

A Mariner Book
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK
 

Ben

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Spokey said:
I think the biggest obstacle in understanding consciousness is that it's conflated with so many other things like intelligence, memory, emotions, & perception (arguably a nebulous concept in itself). So you get scientists saying things like, 'this dog isn't conscious because it can't recognise it's own reflection'.

I remember watching a neuroscientists delightedly poke at drug users and meditators and so on because his brain scans revealed that when approaching the 'god state' or peak experience or whatever you want to call it, his subjects' brains revealed less activity rather than more. He didn't seem to know that for many of the 'travellers' this is exactly the point of the exercise, do nothing to see clearly the underlying nature of reality without all that grist from the intellect, preconceptions, pent up desires and such getting in the way. I don't know if he was conscious, but at least he seemed happy.

I'm reasonably certain that the brain does stuff and isn't just a passive antenna waiting for signals from 'out there' I think there are enough neural networks that do useful stuff out there that prove that isn't the case, but I feel they wont be really useful in explaining consciousness and I'd be reluctant to argue living things without brains or central nervous systems don't have a consciousness though it might be totally alien to our experience of the world.

If I built a machine that acted like a person, would it be conscious? I think it would personally. But if you took away all the things that made it act that way, would it be conscious then? I still think so. Perhaps there is no thing in existence that isn't. If consciousness is an innate property of matter or space and time, then it doesn't really need explaining. All the other things still do though. I usually stop talking at this point, because people often give me funny looks for seriously wondering if a grain of sand on the beach might have an experience of the world.
Yes, cortical activity goes down when you meditate. However, that's how you explore your normally repressed desires and intuitions. The cortex needs to be silent when you want to listen to the limbic system.

Anyway, I don't see how consciousness isn't yet figured out. The brain stem is responsible for physical preservation, you would die without it, the limbic system is responsible for emotions, without it your life would have no meaning. Then the parietal lobes are responsible for thoughts, without it you would only avoid pain and seek pleasure without context. And finally, the highest consciousness, ours, is the frontal lobes. They are responsible for attention processing and awareness of thoughts, people, etc.

It is my goal to maximize the development of my prefrontal cortex. I already had an awakening due to my deep understanding of the subject and my training, now the bridge between the two frontal lobes must awaken for me to reach the ultimate state of consciousness.
 

Waynish

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Anyway, I don't see how consciousness isn't yet figured out.

But this isn't explain how the experiential is caused by the physical - which is the implication. For example, how does LSD affect your consciousness in such a specific way, while very similar molecules do not? If they understand it, then why can't they stabilize it and create reliable happiness? Instead, their "antidepressants" are causing a lot of problems... And they were designed based on their "figured out" mechanisms of consciousness.
 

Collden

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If any of you are following philosophy discussions that are going around you'll see that Panpsychism is slowly picking momentum. Seems to be more and more proponents of it in both philosophy and science. Of course, the frontman there is David Chalmers.

David Chalmers and the Panpsychists
So modern science is coming around to what buddhists figured out thousands of years ago, again.
Leading neuroscientists and Buddhists agree: “Consciousness is everywhere" - Lion's Roar
 

BRMarshall

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Stephen E. Robbins rehabilitation of the work of Henri Bergson, what Robbins calls 'Bergson's holographic theory of mind' is essential, in my opinion, to an expanded understanding of consciousness outside of various traps in philosophy, research and general understanding.

Robbins has written several books on the subject, accessibly readable books, though requiring some attention that might be best accessed through his youtube series
on Bergson, linked on his website, below, along with a number of papers and articles, some concerning some other fascinating, and outside the box, subjects.

Bergson Holographic
 
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