How do you explain consciousness?

Yeah but why?

 

I used to ask myself questions like this 20 years ago and I used to go hunt psilocybin mushrooms to try to find the answers.

I still really don't know....

I'm not a religious sort of person but here's your religious tenant I hold dear to heart.....

Admitting that you do not know is the beginning of gaining understanding.

A man who already knows everything and is convinced of that fact can't be educated.


It's a very dangerous thing for a man to think that he is known of everything.

If, That is your belief.... You had best make sure that your beliefs are born of ultimate truth and not your own perception of the truth that is false.

Kind of a red pill blue pill sort of moment

 

RE: How do you explain consciousness?
SUBTOPIC: Where is it and what does it do?
※→ Dirty Rotten Imbecile, et al,

(COMMENT)

I'm not sure this is true.

(COMMENT)

Question: Can the brain's cognitive functionality kick-start without a "consciousness?" Is "consciousness" a summation of neurological activity? When the pronounce you "brain dead" - what does that mean?

(COMMENT)

The quality of "Consciousness" (if there is such a thing) and "the (1) Synaptic Activity → the Brain (Little Gray Cells)" -- and (2) calculating decision-making processes of the Mind" are not fundamentally different things (ie they are not subject to the ideas of dualism). You can cut-off any or all limbs, and you can still have the ability to make "conscious" decisions. You can remove and transplant any organ below the neck and still have and still maintain the ability to make "conscious" decisions. You can even cut open the skull and expose the brain to the outside world, and still retain the ability to make "conscious" decisions. And the argument can be made that, a neurological standpoint, large portions of the brain can be removed without impairing the ability to make "conscious" decision. (Of course a huge external life support system with be required.)

The internal states of consciousness (as we can detect it today) are outside the proper domain of normal functionality of a living organism with respect to dualism.

.Just My Two-cents Worth,

Most Respectfully,
R

 

That's correct, the view I am presenting deliberately avoids asking any questions about "why", mostly because the answer is definitely unknown. The very idea that there needs to be a why makes assumptions about the origin that we cannot substantiate.

I am a bit suspicious of the wordings. I hold a view in which the consciousness is a mundane emergent property of our brains. The view presented in the TED talk seems like it could be simply a flowery language version of that same view. It's a bit like calling a water molecule wet, it seems a bit pointless, but it can be done with just a bit of word mangling.

In order to draw any interesting conclusions here, I think we need some stronger definitions. What is it about consciousness that is hard to explain, and how do we know it doesn't just derive from normal physical processes?

 

So, for quite a long time now, I have been listening to this really great Podcast by a guy named Stephen West. I’m not as smart as some of you guys so I appreciate how Stephen breaks down philosophical concepts and makes them easy for me to understand.

He has recently started a series about consciousness and has some really good episodes.

Although the list below does not include it, his most recent episode in the Apple Podcast list is about Panpsychism. I found it really amazing and it reinforces some ideas I have had about consciousness.

He’s not political and doesn’t take sides on philosophical discussions but just breaks down the concepts so that I can understand them better.



https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcasts

 

Panpsychism is, by far, my favorite and the most interesting of the possible explanations. I hope it's true. I'll have to listen to the podcast. I've seen a TED talk about it as well that made things pretty easy to understand.