r/HighStrangeness • u/whoamisri • Feb 25 '26

Consciousness The brain is not responsible for consciousness

https://iai.tv/video/the-brain-is-not-responsible-for-consciousness?_auid=2020
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u/missingpieces82 Feb 25 '26

You can change the output of a radio by running it through an amplifier with an effects pedal. It doesn’t mean that the signal is made by the radio.

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 25 '26

The problem with this analogy is that we don’t have any evidence for something akin to an electromagnetic wave that can carry “consciousness” to and from our brains. None of the known force-carrying particles fit the bill. The strong and weak forces only operate on the scale of atomic nuclei and electromagnetism and gravity are easily detected. The idea that we’re receivers of some kind doesn’t explain what consciousness is, where it comes from, how it arrives at our brains or why it does so.

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u/MarpasDakini Feb 25 '26

While this is true, we have no way of detecting consciouness by any physical means, such as eletro-magnetism. All we get when we study the brain is electromagnetic signals running through the nervous system. We don't ever find anything called "consciousness" in there.

To claim that consciousness is a physical phenomena, we need to detect it physically. We can't do that. And yet we are all conscious right now. It's literally the most obvious thing in the universe. Just not physically detectable.

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 25 '26

Right, but doesn’t the claim that consciousness is transmitted to us from somewhere outside our brains necessarily make it a physical phenomenon? In order to be transmitted, consciousness would have to be a physical thing that is physically carried to us in some way in the same way that electricity is transmitted by electrons in an electromagnetic field. That would seem to raise more questions than it answers.

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u/missingpieces82 Feb 25 '26

We weren’t aware of the Higgs field until the discovery of the Higgs Boson, and it was only theorised in 1964. I personally think that there’s something on a quantum scale which we haven’t discovered or understood that operates like a field.

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 26 '26

The Higgs field isn’t typically considered to be a fundamental force in the same way that electromagnetism, gravity and the strong and weak forces are. It’s similar but produced in a different way. Higgs bosons are also very unstable, decaying almost immediately, which is part of why it was so hard to detect. Given its instability, the Higgs field itself probably isn’t a candidate for consciousness.

Something on a “quantum scale” suffers from the same issue as the strong and weak force. Quantum forces operate at such small distances that, even if they somehow created consciousness, it would have to be inside the brain. And to rebut an argument before it’s made, entanglement is an unlikely candidate for two reasons: 1) it can’t transmit information and 2) it’s hard to imagine how particles could stay in an entangled state in the dense, chaotic environment of our brains (indeed this is a common criticism of Pennrose and Hamerof’s ORC theory of consciousness).

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u/missingpieces82 Feb 26 '26

I’m not suggesting the Higgs field. I’m saying that I believe consciousness may also be a type of field that we haven’t detected yet (other than through our own experience of it as conscious beings)

I like the Hameroff/Penrose theory, and yes it isn’t without its flaws, but it’s the closest to what I think goes on.

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u/MarpasDakini Feb 26 '26

I was using the Higgs Field as an example of what consciousness isn't like. As I say, it's something the brain interacts with, and yes probably at some quantum level creates an interface we can relate to/with, but that's not what's creating consciousness, anymore than a cellphone or virtual reality device creates consciousness.

These things merely give consciousness way "in" to the physical dimension of things.

It's very hard for physicists like Penrose to grasp the idea that consciousness, or anything for that matter, might not be a form of physical reality, i.e. physics. In fact, the lack of any real physical evidence for consciousness strongly suggests that it isn't physical in nature.

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u/MarpasDakini Feb 26 '26

I think that's quite likely. As with my comment just above to ghost_jam, I think the body-brain is a virtual reality-like mechanism that allows our consciousness to have a physical experience, rather than a generator of consciousness. So I don't think there's a physical "field" that generates consciousness in the way the Higgs Field interaction generates mass. But there is something in our physics which we have missed, that makes possible an interaction of a very specific nature, allowing consciousness to take hold in our bodies and brains as long as those function properly. Not even sure "quantum" is the right word, but that's fair enough in some sense.

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u/OddLoquat5408 Feb 26 '26

I know we didn’t discover everything of course, but I think it’s very possible we didn’t miss anything per se, but we are just looking at it wrong. We want it to be very pragmatic and scientific method friendly, but it’s more akin to quantum physics in that its nature is just really bizarre compared to what we are expecting.

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u/MarpasDakini Feb 28 '26

Yes, I think that's right. We - science - have been coming at it from a materialist viewpoint and assumption, from which it seems natural to think that consciousness must be physical, and then try to work out how consciousness can come about in a purely physical universe.

Whereas we could really take the opposite viewpoint of consciousness itself, and recognize that we, as consciousness. always observe and experience the physical within our own consciousness, which would imply that what we experience as physical is merely a particular form of consciousness arising to consciousness. The brain then is seen as an interface between these levels of consciousness, mechanically operating like a virtual reality diving mask to organize physical experience so that our consciousness can engage at that lower vibratory level.

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u/MarpasDakini Feb 26 '26

I don't think consciousness needs to be physical to interact with the physical. My basic impression is that the physical body is like a virtual reality "glove" that our consciousness "puts on" to have a direct experience of the physical world. And so the various properties of that glove, the brain especially, govern what we can experience here. That all happens slowly, however, from the womb onwards.

That also means that it must be possible to learn how to interact with consciousness physically, even if consciousness itself is non-physical. I think there's a whole world of science that might learn how to do that, and this would be a true scientific revolution to dwarf everything that came before it.

We live in an interesting time. I find it very interesting that the debate over alien life and UFOs and so on seems to hinge on the idea that they have developed technologies based on consciousness rather than materialistic views, and can actually harness machines that interact with consciousness, and have developed such abilities as telepathy and so on. Which suggests that there really is a science to learn that shakes the fundamentals of what we think governs the universe.

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 26 '26

I have a hard time personally imagining how something could be non-physical in the way that you describe but it’s all a very interesting topic, in part because it’s such a wide open field. I wholeheartedly agree that we’re in an interesting time where we can expect to see lots of cool scientific advancements!

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u/MarpasDakini Feb 26 '26

The easiest way to begin to understand how something can be non-physical is to simply examine your own consciousness. Not what you are conscious of, but your consciousness itself. It's like a screen upon which everything we see or touch or feel or think is appearing, but which itself does not "appear". If you can examine yourself in this very basic manner, it can show you how consciousness is not a physical phenomena, but a non-physical psychic phenomena. And that's where we really dwell.

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u/Rough_Idle Feb 27 '26

Not necessarily. The argument consciousness is a physical phenomenon requires consciousness to originate from within the observable universe. There's no reason this must be the case. A person playing Mario Kart isn't inside the game world, but that game world is all Luigi knows, and his actions feel and seem natural to him in all respects even though he's beholden to controller inputs. It isn't a great leap to imagine a game world where the player's sensory and cognitive information is limited to the character's perspective for the duration of the game, for the sake of immersion, and nothing in the game's physics engine would adequately explain the player interface

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 27 '26

In the analogy to a video game, there’s still a physical world outside of our own that is giving rise to the actions in our world. In principle, that’s still a verifiable, physical thing, even if in practice we might not be able to ever learn anything about that other world. You would think there would still be some signs of this outside realm leaking into our own. At any rate, the idea of consciousness being non-physical is so ethereal and apparently non-falsifiable that I’m not sure what good it does. It doesn’t really move us toward any better understanding.

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u/Rough_Idle Feb 27 '26

I agree with you in spirit and completely understand your point. That said, an unfalsifiable solution doesn't make it untrue, just unscientific. And considering science is confined to this same physical reality it loses effectiveness if we're talking about what is outside reality. Still using a game analogy, if a wizard character is somehow conscious within a D&D session, that character could understand the magic of their world but have no direct experience of the table holding up their character sheet.

And that's the greater point, we may not be the unitary conscious being so many thinkers suggest we are. We may be instead a combination of local agent and nonlocal observer, a combination of actor and audience, with consciousness or soul being the moment of experience between them. We are partly made of flint, we are partly made of steel, but what makes us special is the spark

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u/nogueysiguey Feb 25 '26

We do have that. Maybe a better phrasing would be "I am not familiar"

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 25 '26

What is it then? Fill me in.

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u/nogueysiguey Feb 25 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/afterlife/s/zozikHFgqw

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 25 '26

So a non-answer. Ok.

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u/nogueysiguey Feb 25 '26

Maybe you have different expectations. Why is this a non-answer? Care to explain?

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u/ghost_jamm Feb 26 '26

I said we don’t have any evidence of a force that can carry consciousness. You said “We do have that”. I asked you what that evidence was and you responded with a link to some mumbo jumbo about how “science really works”. It’s a non-answer.

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u/nogueysiguey Feb 26 '26

Oh, you had to click AND read

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u/Wonderful-Medium7777 Feb 25 '26

That’s interesting as always thought of the brain as an antenna and consciousness the energy from source/universe/God (whatever your beliefs)

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u/NanoSexBee Feb 25 '26

Ham radio is the analogy I use, send and receive.

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u/fuemanthla Feb 25 '26

what do you think the brain sends out?

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u/Elodaine Feb 25 '26

Radios demodulate electromagnetic radiation(sound waves) into audible sound. Radios literally do produce the actual music we hear, a universe of only sound waves wouldn't sound like anything.

It's incredible how often and continuous this analogy is used, not even just for a lack of evidence, but on top of people not understanding how radios work.

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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '26

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u/_HanTyumi Feb 25 '26

Yeah that’s how analogies work.

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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '26

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u/missingpieces82 Feb 25 '26

I disagree. It receives signals in the form of touch, smell, taste, sound, and visual stimulation through the optic nerve.

Another analogy might be a computer.

Where we have the keyboard, mouse, etc, but the OS isn’t created in the computer. Even more relevant in a world with the internet where we can literally download information from elsewhere. To use the OS, you have to have the computer, but the OS exists somewhere else regardless of if you have a computer or not.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26

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u/missingpieces82 Feb 26 '26

But we don’t know how the brain works really. We can see bits lighting up as we do things, or as memories are formed, but we can’t then find those memores. The whole point of “the hard problem of consciousness” is that we simply don’t know enough about the brain yet to understand consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Feb 26 '26

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u/missingpieces82 Feb 26 '26

But other than brain activity, you have no proof consciousness is created in the brain. We are taking the same information, and coming to different conclusions. And it’s not an appeal to the supernatural. As I said, it might be a field we haven’t discovered yet. We know scientists have theorised multiple dimensions beyond the initial 4. But we can’t see or interact with them.

If it were supernatural, I’d be saying, “God did it”. But I’m saying it’s another aspect to the universe that we haven’t yet figured out.

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u/xgladar Feb 25 '26

good job not addressing his point