Pick the bones out of this, folks.
"The present work suggests that, rather than hoping for a putative unique marker – the neural correlate of consciousness – a more mature view of conscious processing should consider that it relates to a brain-scale distributed pattern of coherent brain activation," explained neuroscientist Lionel Naccache, one of the authors of the paper.
Science News
Where Does Consciousness Come From?
Where Does Consciousness Come From?
I have the feeling that this may be tough going.
"Contemplating this leads to a host of mind-boggling questions. What are the odds of my consciousness existing at all? How can such a thing emerge from nothingness? Is there any possibility of it surviving my death? And what is consciousness anyway?
Answering these questions is incredibly difficult. Philosopher Thomas Nagel once asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" ..
Sign in to read: Existence: Where did my consciousness come from? - life - 29 July 2011 - New Scientist
That must come high on my list of 'tough questions'.
"What makes humans conscious? As mere collections of organic matter, it’s pretty impressive that we’re even able to ask ourselves this question. What is it that makes our power of self awareness possible?
Setting aside the task of defining what consciousness really means, where does it come from? Here are the options:
1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.
2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).
3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).
These are the only possibilities, right? Let’s look at each one.
1. Humans are not conscious – it’s just an illusion.
If this is the case, then we immediately run into an apparent contradiction. How is it possible to think about whether you’re conscious without actually being conscious?
2. Consciousness comes from something physical (the brain).
This seems like a simple and obvious answer, but it’s really not. Because if consciousness comes from the brain, then there’s no reason we can’t build a conscious machine simply by replicating the brain with mechanical parts.
3. Consciousness comes from something non-physical (a soul).
This would provide a nice answer to the previous question – a program can’t be conscious, because it doesn’t have a soul. Of course, this option comes with its own problems, not the least of which is that it’s a severe violation of Occam’s razor....
When a car shuts down from a dead battery, you just put in a new one and it comes roaring back to life. Why doesn’t the same thing happen with people?"
Where Does Human Consciousness Come From?
I don't know how qualified this guy is, but he puts the points soundly enough.
How did consciousness originate? I have no problem tracing it back to elementary matter (1), and this has some support.
"back in our watery days as fish, we lived in a medium that was inherently unfriendly to seeing things very far away.... In just a few seconds, you’ll reach the edge of where you were able to see. If you’re down in the depths at all, or in less clear water, you may reach the edge of your perceptual horizon in about a second. life is coming at you at such a rate that every second unfolds a whole new tableau of potentially deadly threats, or prey you must grab in order to survive. Given such a scenario, we need to have highly reactive nervous systems,....In 1992, psychologist Bruce Bridgeman wrote that “Consciousness is the operation of the plan-executing mechanism, enabling behavior to be driven by plans rather than immediate environmental contingencies.” No theory of consciousness is likely to account for all of its varied senses, but at least in terms of consciousness-as-operation-of-the-plan-executing-mechanism, due to some very simple “facts of light,” dwelling on land may have been a necessary condition for giving us the ability to survey the contents of our mind.,
Why Did Consciousness Evolve, and How Can We Modify It? | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine
Well, ok, but what actually is it? How does it work?
"In recent years, brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed scientists to observe the brain in action and determine how groups of neurons function.
They have pinpointed hubs in the brain that are responsible for certain tasks, such as fleeing a dangerous situation, processing visual information, making those sweet dreams and storing long-term memories. But understanding the mechanics of how neuronal networks collaborate to allow such tasks has remained more elusive."
Greatest Mysteries: How Does the Brain Work? | LiveScience
Shall we take that as "Ahh..actually, we don't know."?
"It is natural to think that our perceptions are the ultimate reality because they are immediate to our experience. But do we know of anything outside of our own perceptions?
Things, from the very large to the very small, do not actually exist until they are observed. The house next door does not exist until it is perceived. The palm of your hand does not exist until you perceive it.....
We forget how we have come to perceive anything. We mistake a representation of a thing with the actual thing and forget that we did just that. We have become so familiar with this 'geometry' that it seems like reality......Think of your consciousness like a book. Each word in the book represents a concept. Then words are grouped together into related concepts. You know what each word means but there is no meaning and life until you put them together. The meaning of all these words is determined by the relationship between the words. Similarly, you are aware of each part of your self but there is no consciousness until the parts begin to relate. What we think of as awareness arises from relationships.
Now imagine that a small portion of the words in the book changes constantly. At every moment a new batch is added, shifted, or taken away. At each of these moments the book changes into a slightly different form, altering your awareness. If you were alert and able to read as fast as the book was being changed it would seem as though everything were happening "now". If you were not as alert and unable to read as fast as the changes, it would seem as though a new entity, "past" was being created. Then you may realize the level of your awareness depended not upon the speed of your reading, but upon how involved you are in the drama the words illustrate. Some stories in the book you find more interesting than others so you focus on those words more. Suddenly, it appears as though these dramas are "close" to you in space and time while others appear more distant."
ecsys - Humanity without Physical Constraints
Does that mean that the only perception of reality is inside our head? Are we looking at a solipsistic universe?
Obviously not. Our perceptions are (as I said earlier) fallible and misleading and it is the tried and tested mental tools of sound logic and validated evidence which is not only the best method (the only valid method) of deciding what reality is but is also evidence that there IS a reality because if it was all in my mind or yours, what you expected would be what you got. Because the universe surprises us all the time, it has its own reality, apart from what we might think about it.
So our perceptions are neither here nor there except, I suppose in throwing some doubt on the question the believers are longing to put: Is there any evidence that human consciousness is God - given?
I'd say right away, if it is, it was a rather substandard article, simply because of the mis-perceptions we constantly make. But that said, substandard or not, is there any evidence that human consciousness is God - given? perhaps linked with the postulated soul?
"There are several ways of thinking about consciousness as an illusion. Most important is to distinguish them from the view that consciousness does not exist. To say that consciousness is an illusion is to say that it is not what it appears to be. ...On this view human-like consciousness means having a particular kind of illusion. If machines are to have human-like consciousness then they must be subject to this same kind of illusion...(I have placed this para. first as it fits better with the thread here Arq)
Among those who have argued that machine consciousness is impossible are dualists, those who believe in a God-given soul as the seat of consciousness, eliminative materialists who do not believe that consciousness exists in the first place, and those who argue that there is something special about biological brains that precludes anything else from having human-like consciousness. This last is particularly confusing but the problems are well known and discussed (Dennett 1995, McGinn 1987, 1999, Turing 1950). It is worth noting that Searle, in spite of his theory of biological naturalism (Searle 1992), does not exclude the possibility of machine consciousness. Rather he says that any machine could be conscious if it had the same causal properties as a biological brain (Searle 1997). Since he does not say what those properties are, this is no help in creating artificial consciousness.
Dr. Susan Blackmore
This doesn't seem to get us very far but the other websites dealing with this seem to be tripe
"10. The Argument from Consciousness
When we experience the tremendous order and intelligibility in the universe, we are experiencing something intelligence can grasp. Intelligence is part of what we find in the world. But this universe is not itself intellectually aware. As great as the forces of nature are, they do not know themselves. Yet we know them and ourselves. These remarkable facts—the presence of intelligence amidst unconscious material processes, and the conformity of those processes to the structure of conscious intelligence—have given rise to a variation on the first argument for design.
1. We experience the universe as intelligible. This intelligibility means that the universe is graspable by intelligence.
2. Either this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence, or both intelligibility and intelligence are the products of blind chance.
Not blind chance.
3. Therefore this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence.
Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God by Peter Kreeft & Ronald K. Tacelli
That is of course nothing to do with evidence that human consciusness is God- given and that is the only place (outside the Dawkins page and City data -which popped up) that seemed to address the matter in anything other than mystical musigs and preachings from Paul.
Perhaps some other poster can find some sort of case.
(1) one paper seemed to have a problem with 'consciousness' leading the Cambrian explosion but only because of what seemed to me an unjustified separation of conscious animal volition from unconscious organic reaction.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 1.5 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
