The problem of consciousness and awareness

Teralek
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The problem of consciousness and awareness

I think there is a quality about consciousness unlike any other bodily functions.

I'm not here to prove a point but to say, like Carl Sagan once did about reincarnation, that more research is needed on the subject.

Lets take on the comatose state for example, or the vegetative state. Imagine a person in a coma lacking EEG activity, or very low activity... 

The cells are being fed, the heart is beating... everything is working normal. This person doesn't have any visible brain damage... Then why aren't the neurons firing up??! Now with every other body function there is always a substantial chemical evidence to prove why is your kidney or your liver isn't functioning, for example... this doesn't happen in the brain... Why can't the function of awareness be more accurately pinpointed as the kidney function can?

It is commonly known that electrical activity in the brain is linked to the level of awareness one possess (link), saying otherwise is plain stupid, and contrary to evidence. Then why can’t a person with a seemingly unimpaired brain can't wake up from a coma right away?

From a purely empirical level, for all we know, conscious awareness is just electrical activity in the brain but the fact is we haven't yet the slightest idea on how awareness is generated... we are merely correlating EEA (electro encephalic activity) with awareness. that doesn't mean it IS the cause of consciousness.

I think scientific research on NDE's deserve more credit and attention because it can potentially solve this problem. And a rational person looking at it must take into account that the level of conscient awareness a person experiences IS (not like some of you implied at another of my posts, that even a low EEA can give you heightened awareness and vivid memories) related to EEA. There is sufficient evidence in NDE's and other related experiences which show that we are far from understand how awareness comes to be. And that EEA and awareness are correlated but something else may be triggering both, thus is their cause.

More fascinating, and contrary to this or not, is the fact that recent research shows that vegetative state persons have EEG ranging from normal to alpha, to PLEDs, etc. So how come the electricity in the brain is widely different but the behavior is the same? (link)

As to NDE's it's a fact that there is loss of consciousness no more than 18 seconds after cardiac arrest. Thus I can't believe that the brain has vivid memories, receives sensory input while it should be unconscient and it is on a fast track to a flat EEG. As to the G-Lock explanation, I have search for scientifically evidence of this... most what I have found is anecdotal. For example, I can't find any interviews of soldiers that went to G-lock on a scientific paper. The army was not interested on the physiological outcome of the experiences.

Still it is a fact that the soldiers subjected to G-lock went through the first phases of an NDE, this only reinforces the NDE's by giving credibility to the experimenters. In no way this proves the NDE core experience can’t be transcendental.

As to Occam's razor... well Elli still went to a wormhole to find her dad on another planet... and if we'd follow Occam every time... science would have not advanced.

To summarize: it is almost impossible that the NDE happens prior to flat EEG, it is also almost impossible that the NDE happens during flat EEG.


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To summarize: it is almost

To summarize: it is almost impossible that the NDE happens prior to flat EEG, it is also almost impossible that the NDE happens during flat EEG.

 

Why?  You lose consciousness because the brain starts shutting itself down due to lack of oxygen, right?  I would say you'd be right if the brain was a single piece of equipment that shut down at once, but it isn't, it has lots of parts that shut down in some sort of sequence.  It seems more likely that the parts of the brain responsible for NDE phenomenon are kept active longer at the expense of other parts, like hypothermia.

I think the fact that you can physically influence these events points to it being, well, physical, but who knows, maybe it is like the secret physiological combination code to get into the spirit world.

I agree though, the more research the better!  My mother in law had severe pneumonia recently and she had a NDE when her lungs stopped and her oxygen levels dropped, before they intubated her.

 

Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.


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Nice post, Teralek.

 

 

This is a fascinating area. I agree with you and Melles the more research the better. There are good texts out there on the subject of consciousness as an emergent property of multiple modules of the brain - a sort of electrical cloud with neurons moving in and out of the consciousness envelope depending on stimulus and situation. Self is a fascinating and in some ways a spooky area. We are certainly complex and yet quite limited beasts in many ways. Consciousness is clearly a brain template that's deployed awake or asleep. Whether it can be activated while unconscious is a really interesting point. I'd suggest there must be states in between the 2 but I understand the dilemma you highlight here. 

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck


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Of course consciousness is

Of course consciousness is of a different nature to bodily functions, doesn't mean it is transcendental, if that even means anything here.

The observation that the brain can be in an apparently functional state but not conscious merely reflects the truism that the details of the complex processes within the brain are not easily visible, even with the current state of fMRI machines. Just like I have many times have a computer in front of me that seems to have all the basics needed to function, but is unresponsive. It doesn't take much to stall such complex processes.

The relationship between our experience of consciousness, awareness, and the underlying electrical and chemical activity is obviously subtle, and in some sense a two-way process. 

By no means everyone in similar circumstances experiences such things.

We also have to carefully interpret the actual relationship between when a person reports that a particular experience seemed to have occurred and when the underlying activity occurred. Remembered mental experiences, especially under unusual and/or stressful conditions, often are confabulated by the brain from fragmentary traces of apparent memory. This has been clearly demonstrated under many other experiments, so we cannot take such memories on simple face value, even with regard to the remembered sequence of events.

This makes all such internal experiences, such as mystical experiences and 'revelation' as very unreliable as representing more than ideas triggered by underlying sub-conscious processes, or waking dreams, or other such phenomena, except to the extent that they can be firmly correlated with external objectively recorded events.

Have you read anything by Susan Blackmore on NDE's and OOBE's? She did a lot of investigation into this, and from a position of genuine curiosity as to what is behind them has become very much a skeptic, AFAICR.

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Teralek wrote:I think there

Teralek wrote:

I think there is a quality about consciousness unlike any other bodily functions.

There is a quality about the immune system unlike any other bodily functions. So... what?

In both cases, there is no good evidence that either consciousness or the immune system are non-physical.

Quote:
Why can't the function of awareness be more accurately pinpointed as the kidney function can?

Because the brain is vastly more complex than the kidney? That seems like a perfectly natural reason to me. As a science, neuroscience is younger than general physiology, and the brain is vastly complex, and the technology to really understand the low-level functions of neurons is only now starting to emerge. Geez, give the science some time to catch up to the most complex organ known, the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The amount we've learned in just the last few decades is incredible when you consider the difficulty of the subject under study.

Quote:
It is commonly known that electrical activity in the brain is linked to the level of awareness one possess (link), saying otherwise is plain stupid, and contrary to evidence. Then why can’t a person with a seemingly unimpaired brain can't wake up from a coma right away?

I don't know. Now, turn the question around and apply it to your non-physical hypothesis? If the person is perfectly healthy, except for being in a coma, why can't the spirit just enter the body and wake it up? No answers there either. In fact, there are more questions. Such as:

- Why don't people spontaneously fall into comas some times, if the spirit just decides to go on vacation for a bit (think of the human possession in the movie Avatar, or the similar possession in the movie Surrogates)?

- Why is it that every time someone goes into a coma, it is linked with some form of physical problem with their body (head injury, cardiac arrest, overdose of drug/medication, asphyxiation, diabetes or other illness, etc.)?

- Why is it that the only time people wake up from a coma is when their bodies have been cared for, sustained with intravenous nutrition, and given a chance to heal from whatever injuries or imbalances that put them in the coma in the first place? Is the spirit stuck outside the body until the body gets healed? Why?

- Why are some (dangerous) drugs available that can temporarily wake a person out of a coma? Do the drugs somehow 'call' the spirit back into the body? How does that even make any sense?

- Why is it that there have not been any unambiguous pieces of information retrieved by so-called out of body experiences? All such positive reports are anecdotal and unfalsifiable. All such reports that *were* falsifiable, .... you guessed it ... were falsified.

Etc. etc.

NDEs, out-of-body, disembodied spirits, and the like, have *no* good evidence to support them *as* non-physical happenings. Certainly, people have *experiences* of NDEs, out-of-body, and disembodied spirits. But these experiences always come from people whose brains are intact and functioning *inside* their heads. In other words, the only experiences of disembodied minds come from *embodied* minds. Just what you'd expect if such experiences were the result of physical interactions within the brain.

Quote:
From a purely empirical level, for all we know, conscious awareness is just electrical activity in the brain but the fact is we haven't yet the slightest idea on how awareness is generated... we are merely correlating EEA (electro encephalic activity) with awareness. that doesn't mean it IS the cause of consciousness.

Note: it also doesn't mean that it is NOT the cause of consciousness, either.

Quote:
I think scientific research on NDE's deserve more credit and attention because it can potentially solve this problem.

Google Susan Blackmore, who started her career investigating these and many other kinds of paranormal experiences. She was a true believer when she started, but after applying scientific methods to her investigations, she discovered, much to her disappointment, that none of the 'evidence' added up to anything supporting these things as being non-physical. She's a very interesting character, I recommend you look her up.

Quote:
As to Occam's razor... well Elli still went to a wormhole to find her dad on another planet... and if we'd follow Occam every time... science would have not advanced.

Wrong. If we *hadn't* followed Occam's Razor every time, science would not have advanced.

Science depends on evidence. Occam's Razor looks at evidence. If there is *evidence* for a theory, then you *cannot* apply Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor is only applied when there is *no* good evidence for a theory. (This is a simplification of OR for the purpose of this conversation; we can discuss it in detail if you really want to.)

Occam's Razor is used to prioritize our efforts, and to simplify the jungle of ideas out there, but cutting away the tangled underbrush, allowing us to navigate our way and find useful paths without getting tripped up by useless obstacles and wasting our time following dead ends.

Occam's Razor says, "Show me the evidence, or stop bothering me with your unsubstantiated speculations. It's okay to speculate, but do that on your own time, find some evidence that supports your speculation, and *then* we can talk."

Occam's Razor is the perfect tool for dealing with claims that NDEs represent non-physical reality. There is no good evidence, so we chop that hypothesis from the path and move on to more promising theories like cognitive neuroscience.

By the way, Ellie had her own personal experience to keep her a believer, but remember that a key piece of evidence was hidden away and not revealed to her: The tape recorder recorded 18 minutes of silence during the time she was in the device. This evidence cannot be ignored by Occam's Razor. Clearly, something must have happened that caused the recorder's discrepancy. And Ellie's hypothesis is consistent with this evidence. It is only by hiding the evidence from her that the antagonists in the story were able to discredit her. Had that evidence been available, she would have had a much stronger case. Occam's Razor would have *supported* her, not the other way around.

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Teralek
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It also interesting to note

It also interesting to note that only 20% of the people that go through a cardiac arrest experience a NDE. This is uncorrelated with the duration of the arrest. Why is this we don't know.

This is no prove of nothing but I think science should have all options on the table.

natural wrote:
- Why don't people spontaneously fall into comas some times, if the spirit just decides to go on vacation for a bit (think of the human possession in the movie Avatar, or the similar possession in the movie Surrogates)? 

I don't think of movies when I'm talking about this for the same reason I don't think of the Bible either...

These are all interesting questions you pose but I have no precise answers for them, only speculations and anecdotal evidence.

However we interpret the facts differently. There are unexplained reports like Pam Reynolds case

I have read Susan Blackmore, I know what she says, to proof from there either... She believes in memes theory and that also is not very scientific... everyone has their agenda...


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Teralek wrote:It also

Teralek wrote:

It also interesting to note that only 20% of the people that go through a cardiac arrest experience a NDE. This is uncorrelated with the duration of the arrest. Why is this we don't know.

This is no prove of nothing but I think science should have all options on the table.

It does. It just doesn't take any of them seriously unless there's good evidence.

Quote:
natural wrote:
- Why don't people spontaneously fall into comas some times, if the spirit just decides to go on vacation for a bit (think of the human possession in the movie Avatar, or the similar possession in the movie Surrogates)? 

I don't think of movies when I'm talking about this for the same reason I don't think of the Bible either...

Obviously, I have to use fiction to illustrate this hypothetical scenario *precisely* because it doesn't happen in real life.

Quote:
These are all interesting questions you pose but I have no precise answers for them, only speculations and anecdotal evidence.

Well, at least you're admitting it's only speculation. That's a very intellectually honest position, so I don't fault you for that.

Quote:
However we interpret the facts differently. There are unexplained reports like Pam Reynolds case

Unexplained reports are necessarily ... unexplained. To tack on an ad hoc 'explanation' is just further speculation. It doesn't mean anything without good evidence.

Quote:
I have read Susan Blackmore, I know what she says, to proof from there either... She believes in memes theory and that also is not very scientific... everyone has their agenda...

I believe in memes as well, but I don't claim that they are certainly real, only that they seem very plausible to me and I expect that the speculative hypothesis will eventually find good evidence, similarly to how the hypothesis of evolution existed long before Darwin collected the necessary evidence to turn it from a hypothesis to a theory.

The benefit of something like a hypothesis of memes is that it is theoretically falsifiable. Not so with claims of spirits. No matter what the evidence shows, true believers will continue to believe in spirits. Show me a theory that accurately accounts for the apparent adaptations of religion to cultural milieu and psychological temperament of its believers without requiring the concept of heritable transmission of adaptations from one cultural idea to the next, and I'll gladly reject memetics in favour of this other theory. But currently there is no such theory, and memetics is a plausible naturalistic hypothesis with the potential to make falsifiable predictions, so it's a perfectly good candidate for a scientific hypothesis, even if it's not currently supported by good evidence.

The point about non-physical spirits is that they have none of these properties that would make them good viable candidates for scientific investigation. Memes would be physical. Spirits are not. You could measure memes, much as we now can measure genes. Spirits cannot be measured. Falsifiable predictions can be made with meme theory. No falsifiable predictions are possible with spirits (and what falsifiable predictions have been made in the past have all been falsified; their proponents then go on to make ad hoc explanations for why their predictions failed).

To support the idea of non-physical spirits, you basically have to throw away most of the best and strongest tools of science. You have to give up on science. Memes are not like that. If memes turn out to be real, they will fit in just fine with existing sciences of physics, biology, neurology, cognitive science, information theory, psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, etc.

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I agree with you, there is

I agree with you, there is just one thing...

Before the discovery of radiation through scientific measurments, any proof of it's existence was anecdotal. The same happens with "spirits", I believe. Science will reach the truth eventually. 


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Teralek wrote:I agree with

Teralek wrote:

I agree with you, there is just one thing...

Before the discovery of radiation through scientific measurments, any proof of it's existence was anecdotal. The same happens with "spirits", I believe. Science will reach the truth eventually. 

But the history of science suggests that the truth will be nothing like what we intuitively think.

The events that people ascribe to the effects of spirits are mostly, if not all, explicable by science already.

A reasonable assumption would be that any remaining mysteries will disappear along with the spirits/demons that were once believed to be behind literally everything.

If they don't resolve that way, as I said, they will most likely be a manifestation of something far harder to grasp than a disembodied mind of some kind.

It really seems to me that as we get deeper into each field of science, what we find gets more and more counter-intuitive, like relativity, quantum mechanics, multi-dimensional space-time, etc, and further and further from the concepts generated by our uninformed minds.

What we find as we get into the quantum realm is that things seem to occur purely randomly, the very opposite of something under the influence of a designing sentience.

Just as the intuitively 'obvious' ideas in the physical realm, that the sun goes around the earth, or that heavy objects must fall faster than light objects, were shown to be incorrect once they could be properly tested.

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Teralek wrote:The cells are

Teralek wrote:
The cells are being fed, the heart is beating... everything is working normal. This person doesn't have any visible brain damage... Then why aren't the neurons firing up??!

Is there such a case? No brain damage, no poisoning, no disorder of metabolism, no medication? I'd like to see an example for this first.


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I just want to point out

I just want to point out that we have more advanced ways of measuring brain activity than EEG's, which only measure the electrical fields generated by these active cells, but not where those cells are. There's positron emission tomography scans (PET scans) which can locate neuron activity but don't provide much information about the structure of the brain, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which can give us a good anatomy of the brain, and functional MRI (fMRI) which combines PET and MRI to show changing neural activity and anatomical details in real time (but doesn't directly measure cell activity, just where the blood flows to). There's also the questionable transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which uses strong magnets to "shut off" parts of the brain, but as you can see that's potentially dangerous and no-one really knows the long-term safety of it. In any case, the biggest obstacle is not where brain activity, such as thoughts and feelings, is taking place, but how thoughts and feelings are being produced by the brain.

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BobSpence1 wrote:But the

BobSpence1 wrote:
But the history of science suggests that the truth will be nothing like what we intuitively think.
True, and this means that even atheists could be wrong... we just don't know

BobSpence1 wrote:
The events that people ascribe to the effects of spirits are mostly, if not all, explicable by science already.
Not always, and many explanations are just probability assessments based on certain premises. Others are just perfectly understood scientifical phenomena as you say

BobSpence1 wrote:
A reasonable assumption would be that any remaining mysteries will disappear along with the spirits/demons that were once believed to be behind literally everything.
Yes this is reasonable, but I don't believe it 

BobSpence1 wrote:
If they don't resolve that way, as I said, they will most likely be a manifestation of something far harder to grasp than a disembodied mind of some kind.
 

BobSpence1 wrote:
It really seems to me that as we get deeper into each field of science, what we find gets more and more counter-intuitive, like relativity, quantum mechanics, multi-dimensional space-time, etc, and further and further from the concepts generated by our uninformed minds.
double  . Everytime I hear a physicist say that consciense can change reality by merely observing it, gives me the chills... this means the nature of conscience is unique in it's realation to reality... what do you think?... Anyway... I think we know close to nothing... Shrodinger's cat paradox is not yet solved in my opinion.

BobSpence1 wrote:
What we find as we get into the quantum realm is that things seem to occur purely randomly, the very opposite of something under the influence of a designing sentience.
Unless the intent was randomness...

BobSpence1 wrote:
Just as the intuitively 'obvious' ideas in the physical realm, that the sun goes around the earth, or that heavy objects must fall faster than light objects, were shown to be incorrect once they could be properly tested.
Yes... and this really should make us humble in the order of things and be careful not to stubornly uphold an idea like atheism or theism 

El-ahrairahIn wrote:
... In any case, the biggest obstacle is not where brain activity, such as thoughts and feelings, is taking place, but how thoughts and feelings are being produced by the brain.
When I put in prespective all that I've read on NDEs they tell me that some thoughts and feelings are external to the brain. The brain merely regulates and tunes the "signal". But you probably have other interpretation


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Atheism is not a theory, it

Atheism is not a theory, it is a rational evaluation of the effective absence of anything that might be called a God, and the incoherent nonsense surrounding the idea. A theory is an idea about the existence and nature of some specific thing. That cannot describe atheism of the most common sort.

It is not in the same category as Theism, a specific belief in some fairly specific God. If you are putting Theism into the unprovable category, you are virtually an atheist yourself, because that is what most atheist do.

 

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Teralek wrote:BobSpence1

Teralek wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:
It really seems to me that as we get deeper into each field of science, what we find gets more and more counter-intuitive, like relativity, quantum mechanics, multi-dimensional space-time, etc, and further and further from the concepts generated by our uninformed minds.
double  . Everytime I hear a physicist say that consciense can change reality by merely observing it, gives me the chills... this means the nature of conscience is unique in it's realation to reality... what do you think?... Anyway... I think we know close to nothing... Shrodinger's cat paradox is not yet solved in my opinion.

 

When I hear this, it seems to be to be another way of saying of how measurement can change a value.  For example, if you measure a liquid or gas flow rate in a pipe, it will change the pressure in the pipe.  If you measure the pressure, it will change the rate of flow in the pipe.  Regardless of how you measure, or what you measure, what is actually happening in the pipe changes because you have measured it. 

We don't see this when we do simpler measures like measuring length of a piece of lumber or distance road.  We do see this if the thing we are measuring is reactive to human skin oils or something else in our environment.

People have learned how to compensate for these changes of the substance when we measure.  Otherwise, we would never be able to manipulate our environment the way we have. 

I am not a physicist, but I have an engineering degree.  Measurements and the vagaries of measuring were pounded into my head.  So quantum mechanics is not my specialty, but I really do understand why just the act of observing something can change that thing.  It isn't at all mysterious if you just remember the difficulty of precisely measuring flow or pressure in a pipe.

This is not the same thing the quantum physicists are saying.  This is me putting what they are saying in a context I understand.  I may be all wrong about the concept, and if I am, I expect someone will tell me about it.


 

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cj wrote:Teralek

cj wrote:

Teralek wrote:

BobSpence1 wrote:
It really seems to me that as we get deeper into each field of science, what we find gets more and more counter-intuitive, like relativity, quantum mechanics, multi-dimensional space-time, etc, and further and further from the concepts generated by our uninformed minds.
double  . Everytime I hear a physicist say that consciense can change reality by merely observing it, gives me the chills... this means the nature of conscience is unique in it's realation to reality... what do you think?... Anyway... I think we know close to nothing... Shrodinger's cat paradox is not yet solved in my opinion.

When I hear this, it seems to be to be another way of saying of how measurement can change a value.  For example, if you measure a liquid or gas flow rate in a pipe, it will change the pressure in the pipe.  If you measure the pressure, it will change the rate of flow in the pipe.  Regardless of how you measure, or what you measure, what is actually happening in the pipe changes because you have measured it. 

We don't see this when we do simpler measures like measuring length of a piece of lumber or distance road.  We do see this if the thing we are measuring is reactive to human skin oils or something else in our environment.

People have learned how to compensate for these changes of the substance when we measure.  Otherwise, we would never be able to manipulate our environment the way we have. 

I am not a physicist, but I have an engineering degree.  Measurements and the vagaries of measuring were pounded into my head.  So quantum mechanics is not my specialty, but I really do understand why just the act of observing something can change that thing.  It isn't at all mysterious if you just remember the difficulty of precisely measuring flow or pressure in a pipe.

This is not the same thing the quantum physicists are saying.  This is me putting what they are saying in a context I understand.  I may be all wrong about the concept, and if I am, I expect someone will tell me about it. 

I too find difficulty grasping these Quantum ideas, and I too am an engineer.

What makes sense to me is that the minimum amount of energy involved in an interaction is determined by quantum relationships and will involve some finite amount of energy or momentum. So when you get down to a really small scale, this limits the precision, and also means that to measure the position or momentum of a single particle or photon, it has to interact with some of comparable energy/momentum which means its energy or momentum is going to be significantly changed by the measuring photon, or particle, limiting our ability to measure things at that scale.

It has nothing to do with an observer as a conscious being. This has been tested by setting up an automated instrument to perform the same steps we would in consciously making a measurement, and record the results, for a person to check on at any arbitrary time down the track. And the pattern or results was essentially the same as when there was an a conscious observer actively involved in conducting the observations in real time. It is the physical process of performing a measurement not the act of conscious perception, that affects the results.

Schroedingers Cat thought experiment was deeply flawed in my view. For a start, the cat itself was an observer.

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BobSpence1

BobSpence1 wrote:

Schroedingers Cat thought experiment was deeply flawed in my view. For a start, the cat itself was an observer.

 

Of course!

 

-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.

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