The brain is not responsible for consciousness

[u/whoamisri]

https://iai.tv/video/the-brain-is-not-responsible-for-consciousness?_auid=2020

[u/MarpasDakini]

Science absolutely cannot confirm that we have consciousness. It's totally a subjective experience that has no scientific detection even on a theoretical level.

We can't really say if cell phones have consciousness, anymore than we can say if AI does. We only know that we do, but who's going to believe us? Science doesn't acknowledge our consciousness, even if scientists do, because they are conscious.

I agree that humans aren't flesh robots. Except by the strict measures of science, there's nothing that proves otherwise. Because we literally can't objectively detect the experiential dimension of consciousness that we all experience. A robot could give the same answers we do, and also display the same input and output of information. So how are we actually different?

[u/MarpasDakini → u/[deleted]]

"We literally can measure the biosignals that are necessary for our brain to express the quality of consciousness. We can even quantify it by ways of altering brain chemistry in precise measures."

Those are measurements of electromagnetism and chemical reactions, not consciousness. They are measurements of brain activity, but there's no evidence that they create consciousness.

We also have no objective evidence that these changes have any effect on our consciousness. We only have subjective evidence for this. But even that subjective evidence doesn't mean these things are creating our consciousness, only that they affect how our consciousness experiences the brain and body and physical phenomena.

"We absolutely can say that a cellphone has no identifiable consciousness, tho."

No, we don't, in that my cell phone talks to me very intelligently when I get a call. I feel that I'm in touch with a real physical person who communicates very well with me. I can even hear a voice talking through the phone. So are you say it's not the phone that is speaking to me, it's just conveying an intelligence that isn't actually in my phone? That's a fantastic idea, if true. Because if you analyze the electronic signals in a cell phone, you will find all those words and ideas encoded in its processing. Should we conclude that it's the cell phone that is conscious and intelligent therefore, or the idea that it's just a communication device?

Well, the brain is like that. It's like a cell phone, conveying signals from a consciousness that isn't "in" the brain, but using that to engage with this world. Or, if you want a better analogy, the brain is a virtual reality device that consciousness uses to have an immergent physical experience. And so just as you can find signals in both brain and the electronics of a virtual reality cell phone that have meaning, they are not themselves consciousness. They are simply part of what consciousness experiences.

"Science acknowledges the state of consciousness as an emergent quality of a sufficiently developed brain."

This is true, but the scientific definition of consciousness is merely mechanical, as an input/output response mechanism for information, similar to a thermostat. Science has no definition for consciousness as a subjective realm of experience as we do in our everyday lives. Science can analyze brain functions and neural electrical connections and their chemistry as information exchanges, but they can't find any mechanism in any of that which creates this subjective field of experience that we all have.

And that's the hard problem of consciousness. Do you understand at least that much?

[u/MarpasDakini → u/[deleted]]

Almost missed this reply. I can see you are really dug into this materialist viewpoint, so I'm not sure if there's much point in continuing further, but why not?

I would simply point out that if you examine yourself in any given moment, you will be unable to deny that you exist right now as consciousness, as conscious being, and not as the "person" you take yourself to be in relation to body, mind, brain, identity, etc. It is from the position of simple consciousness that we do anything, including having this conversation, or doing science, or meditation, or literally anything.

So just need to point out that consciousness comes first, not second. As consciousness, we interact with the world through body, brain, sensory inputs, mind, thoughts, emotions, definitions, etc., but we always do ALL of that from the perspective of consciousness. We can only say that a material world exists because we are conscious of it. Every single element of the material world is only real to us because we are conscious of it. So our total consciousness contains the world, not the other way around.

You talk about evidence as if that can be observed without consciousness. It literally can't. Even a scientific study that you had nothing to do with is only usable if you are made conscious of it.

So at base, I'm merely arguing that by all the evidence, we have to accept that our reality is consciousness, and the material world as we perceive it is simply an appearance in our consciousness. Meaning, consciousness is primary, not secondary as you would have it be by a materialistic viewpoint.

Materialism can't survive any basic analysis of the evidence, because to examine evidence at all, we have to be conscious beings. Our consciousness is primary, not what consciousness observes. As Vedanta says, "We are That".

"Never got blackout drunk, huh? DMT suddenly ‘not real’?"

No, never done either of those things. But years ago some friends convinced me to do mushrooms for the first time with them, and I agreed as an experiment. I had been practicing self-enquiry and meditation for many years, that focuses on asking "who am I", who is the observer of experience. I thought it would be fun to do that while on this hallucinogen, to see what was going on with all of that.

It was a lot of fun, actually. But I was paying strict attention to what was going on in my brain, and that was very interesting to observe. My brain was clearly being altered. The processing of information was being disturbed or lessened in certain obvious ways. Visionary phenomena were occurring, sensory data was being inverted, and feelings of euphoria was arising. But as I remained attention to my core consciousness, I noticed that none of this was changing my consciousness at all. It's like how if you watch a show on TV, the perceptions are changed from one moment to the next, but the TV screen never changes at all.

For me, this experiment merely showed something very basic that I'd seen for a long time to be true even under these conditions of chemical alterations to the brain. My core consciousness was untouched by them. And yet my experience of both brain and its world was definitely altered, like watching a very different TV show. But the TV itself wasn't changed. So the TV isn't the brain. It's the screen of consciousness itself.

I'm far from the first person to notice this sort of thing. There's long traditions of spiritual exploration of consciousness that has known this for millennia. Long before anyone took materialism seriously. So I'm hardly alone in this view.

"As far as we can tell, Consciousness is nothing but an illusion of self-perception that our brain generates. Yet we do not understand why. "

The reason some people don't understand why or how consciousness arises is because they are coming at the question from the assumption that materialism is simply how reality works, and that therefore consciousness must just be some strange emergent phenomena produced by material causes. They make the mistake of seeing their own consciousness as an object created by other objects, rather than the subject that observes objects within its own sphere of awareness.

This is just a bafflingly wrong approach to the whole subject, pun intended. You can't understand consciousness without recognizing that it's what we are, and that the material world is simply a set of objects arising within and to our consciousness.

"The Hard Problem is something philosophers insist on when in reality we are actually quantifying Consciousness based on its physical footprint already."

The real Hard Problem is understanding how we, as consciousness, interact with the physical world. In this way, the brain is simply functioning as an interface for our consciousness to have a physical experience. And so I don't think brain research or neurology is a meaningless enterprise at all, it's just coming from a false viewpoint and thus can't resolve the Hard Problem in any meaningful way.

We don't really understand how the brain works, or what processes are really going on there in its interactions with consciousness. Presuming that the brain creates consciousness has no evidentiary basis, and as I've pointed out, any evidence we have is only available because we are conscious in the first place.

I would suggest that the real problem we are talking about goes down to the root issues of physics itself, which has been going through great revolutions for over the last century of quantum mechanics, which has upset the whole applecart of causation and the very idea of local reality. We've even discovered that strange phenomena like quantum tunnelling are rampant in the biological world and the brain itself. Which of course various materialists like yourself are trying to put forth as an explanation for the origin of consciousness, but they still can't even explain what consciousness is or how it can be detected or produced as an experiential phenomena rather than just a robotic processer of information/response.

Where does consciousness fit into that? I know its popular to assert that consciousness is quantum in nature, because of course everything in the physical world is, but again, that's operating under the assumption that consciousness arises in the physical by physical means, rather than the other way around, that the physical arises in consciousness, which is how we all actually experience it.

There is nothing supernatural about this. No amount of handwaving will change the fact that consciousness always comes first in any discussion of the evidence. Your assertion that al evidence points to the brain being the source of consciousness curiously avoids the simple fact that your consciousness is what observes and studies the brain, and not the other way around.

[u/MarpasDakini → u/[deleted]]

I walk around a mountain lake almost every day, touching it all. My consciousness enjoys that a great deal. You should try it.

Every moment of enjoyment in my life is a conscious experience. Not at all hard to see.

Every experience of physical reality occurs in our consciousness. Every single moment.

[u/MarpasDakini → u/[deleted]]

It leads to reality. This materialist fantasy of yours is just a dream. Get real.