Human consciousness is much more than mere brain activity

The Edgar Cayce and Ingo Swann type of psychic tracking and remote viewing show that either we are more than our brains or the "outside" and "everywhere else" exist as parts of our brains. And to postulate that consciousness can extend outside of our sensory field of view gets close to an "all is one" explanation.

IMO The brain is a radio antenna and the body is just our shells, but that lets call the force of life is all around us and in everything. I think N.N.'___' has much to do with our obsession with life and the shedding of the body.

We all trip for 9 hours a day straight every single day off of one of the most powerful hallucinogens known to man, and if you skip this trip for a day you feel terrible, many days and your body just forces you to sleep or else you die.

I like to think the dream world is much more real than our physical world, where we bring forth our own realities into existence from nothing but this hallucinogen that is made directly in the center of your brain, and it is one of the most illegal substances schedule 1 to be in possession of because it expands your mind and makes you see past all this bull crap that humanity tries to push on you every single day.

Its also the same feeling you get when you die or have a NDE, the same chemicals get released upon death, also there are more organisms on this planet that contain '___' than don't, and is 100% non toxic, you could smoke it everyday of your life and the only side effects would be from the smoke itself entering into your lungs.

Originally posted by AceWombat04
Recent research suggests that we may in fact have no free will in the traditional sense, and that our experience of awareness may merely be an illusion - a highly persistent illusion, but an illusion nevertheless - generated as a form of emergent behavior. In some experiments involving electrical stimulation of the brain, they were able to provoke not only physical movement, but the experience of volition. That is to say that the subject believed they were choosing to move, when in reality both that sense of choice and the movement itself were externally stimulated. This proves that it is at least possible for external stimuli, distinct from our awareness or consciousness, to create the illusion of volition.

I would love to see more information on this research.

As for your ability to sleep at night, if you can't come up with a plausible answer to the question in this thread, then take heart: you're still a long way away from proving yourself to be nothing but an automaton.

The idea of emergent phenomena is cool (and I think emergence is a big part of both natural and social systems), but it still does not come even one step closer to explaining the mystery.

If we just just brain activity then what part of us is "us" as opposed to just chemical reactions. Where is the fibre of our being? Does it lie in the brain, or is the brain affected by our soul, something is is not connected physically to our brain but affects it?

Originally posted by Buford2
Thanks for this thread. I have an uncle who has Dementia. He smiles everywhere he goes and he talks to his dog like it is a human. He also enjoys sweeping the floor and has no problem walking up to a stranger and talking with them like he has known them forever.

These "medical" terms are really just cultural/social constructs. Bring him out to a place where the population density is low, and he'd probably fit right in. You go to a city doctor and tell him he walks up to strangers and talks to them freely, and he's "mentally ill".

To be entirely honest, I have a hard time believing that he would be diagnosed for dementia without having memory impairment. Did you neglect to mention this by chance?!

Originally posted by EthanT

Human consciousness is much more than mere brain activity

www.guardian.co.uk

How does the animated meat inside our heads produce the rich life of the mind? Why is it that when we reflect or meditate we have all manner of sensations and thoughts but never feel neurons firing? It's called the "hard problem", and it's a problem the physician, philosopher and author Raymond Tallis believes we have lost sight of – with potentially disastrous results.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Partial, incomplete, and evolving intellects would be helpless in the universe, would be unable to form the first rational thought pattern, were it not for the innate ability of all mind, high or low, to form a universe frame in which to think. If mind cannot fathom conclusions, if it cannot penetrate to true origins, then will such mind unfailingly postulate conclusions and invent origins that it may have a means of logical thought within the frame of these mind-created postulates. And while such universe frames for creature thought are indispensable to rational intellectual operations, they are, without exception, erroneous to a greater or lesser degree.

Conceptual frames of the universe are only relatively true; they are serviceable scaffolding which must eventually give way before the expansions of enlarging cosmic comprehension. The understandings of truth, beauty, and goodness, morality, ethics, duty, love, divinity, origin, existence, purpose, destiny, time, space, even Deity, are only relatively true. God is much, much more than a Father, but the Father is man’s highest concept of God; nonetheless, the Father-Son portrayal of Creator-creature relationship will be augmented by those supermortal conceptions of Deity which will be attained in man's accendent career. Man must think in a mortal universe frame, but that does not mean that he cannot envision other and higher frames within which thought can take place.

The realms of the finite exist by virtue of the eternal purpose of God. Finite creatures, high and low, may propound theories, and have done so, as to the necessity of the finite in the cosmic economy, but in the last analysis it exists because God so willed. The universe cannot be explained, neither can a finite creature offer a rational reason for his own individual existence without appealing to the prior acts and pre-existent volition of ancestral beings, Creators or procreators.

Originally posted by TupacShakur
Human consciousness is nothing more than mere brain activity. Everything we do can be explained by a certain part of the brain having a different function than the next one, which in combination makes us the people we are, who think what we think, do what we do, say what we say, see what we see, etc.

Your looking far too shallow to understand such concepts. Yes brain activity indicates what maybe going on, but try and flip your whole perception regarding this monitorable activity, the brain operates within the none observable realm, but manifests itself within the physical realm, this is what you see when monitoring and seeing with machines.

OK kids. The solution to this "problem" - the "hard problem" (of David Chalmers), is so simple, you will find it hard to believe.

Anything that ever "exists", whether it be a atoms, radiation, the universe, or consciousness, can all be attributed to a kind of structure (because that's all there ever is in the world - structure). What is this structure?

It is called the logic loop. This structure begets everything else.

The structure of consciousness is a logic loop regardless of its underlying substrate (biological, metallic, etc.). And so are other things: Quantum Observer-Observed, Godel's incompleteness, paradoxes, tautologies, life, reproduction, fractals, language and meaning... even love...

Logic loops "explain" everything. Or rather, it is a prerequisite for anything to exist.

Is this the first time in history that some people know about this? NO. Kabbalists already know this, but of course they never use the term "logic loop". But they know this structure, and they even know the hazards of "knowing" it - you can even find it in the Book of Genesis if you know what to look for ;-)

(A word of caution: Knowledge of working logic loops are both a blessing and a curse - it is the source of all good and evil in this world.)

While philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, biologists, neurologists, phychologists, and other -ogists, are still trying to figure out what has been known in secret thousands of years before.

This structure was already even known in the ancient east, symbolized by the taijitu (the yin yang symbol). Contrary to popular understanding, it doesn't primarily symbolize polarities. Rather it symbolizes the logic loop in a topological fashion.

So the solution to this problem already exists, but the internet will not spoonfeed you the complete understanding of the solution. You must look for it in different places and put it together. Don't just take my word for it.

I hesitate to give you my complete reading list, lest you not appreciating the value of this very concept. But here's some tidbits:

-VS Ramachandran - meaning, qualia
-David Chalmers - hard problem
-Chris Langan (yes, THAT Langan, the alleged "crackpot" who claims to have an IQ of 190) - CTMU, SCSPL (self-configuring self-procesing language)
-Hermetic Principles
-Ouroboros
-Neural Networks - feedforward and feedback

That's a small tidbit of my journey.

I have always found this to be true: "seek and ye shall find"

A final word: feedback loops have always been thought of as something to be avoided - circular reasoning, circular deduction, unpredictability, chaotic mathematical behavior, limits of logic, etc. It turns out that it is the essential key to existence. Somehow, someone's doing a good job so far hiding the truth ;-) And as long a people refuse to understand the peculiar nature of this structure because they think is yucky, the truth will always remain hidden.

reply to post by laymanskeptic

Star for a post that intrigued me enough to update my reading list.

Incidentally, I too have found much truth in "Seek and ye shall find."

Also in "Assume ye know it all and ye shall debate fruitlessly and increase thy blood pressure whilst doing so."

(I'm not sure if Jesus said the latter one though)

I think that the brain is just the filter we perceive this world through. There is alot more to conciousness than most people know.

reply to post by EthanT


I feel like all of us are on some sort of autopilot programming right now. It feels like a cocoon type phase. I know this sounds weird but that's what I have felt about us. The more reluctant and aware are very very very very very rare but the number of people I see is growing!

reply to post by unityemissions


So a person who walks up to strangers and speaks immediatly as if he knows them is mentally ill?
If this is true ? Color me bonkers because, I have the greatest time doing this, at malls, or on trips to vegas.
It's an absolute blast. Say for instance, I'm having a conversation with my wife and we can't decide on something.
I'll randomly include some passerby in the conversation. Some people will stop and get all involved.
Their the most fun. So that prolly makes them mentally ill too ? So if we keep bringing people into the conversation ?
Soon we would know, where all the mentally ill people were. they'd all be standing around talking their heads off to each other. Having a way better time then most of the stuck up snobs.



:

The article says consciousness is more, but doesn't say what, then ends with "I don't know". He claims all of our current studies are all somehow wrong, but doesn't say what... just cites "reductionism" as the issue.

I don't see how anything contained in the article confirms the claim in it's title.

Someone posted this video on facebook today & i thought of this thread

they titled the video:

this is reality

reply to post by EmeraldGreen


Science says ! B.S.
I hate when people say second line.

Originally posted by laymanskeptic
OK kids. The solution to this "problem" - the "hard problem" (of David Chalmers), is so simple, you will find it hard to believe.

You say it is "simple" but then tell us we have to read a number of esoteric books in order to understand it. That doesn't sound simple to me.

I'm a programmer and I code logic loops all the time, I've also studied AI in degree level computer science and know all about feedback loops. I've seen nothing to suggest that these structures are anything but mechanical. Such structures can even be physically mechanical such as in the case of speed governors. To simply say that "logic loops" are the simple answer to consciousness is missing out all the hard bits of the problem. They may have some role in why consciousness arises but to offer them as an answer is as useful as saying that consciousness arises due to our use of language.

I find the hard problem of consciousness the most fundamental mystery of life. There are so many interesting aspects to the problem.

One aspect is the illusion of indivisibility that a conscious mind has. Our bodies are colonies of millions of cells but somewhere inside us is a singular thing that cannot conceive of itself being split into multiple parts. A thought experiment: Imagine we could split your brain in two, each half with it's own eyeball, and keep both halves alive and "conscious". Which half would be YOU? There is an atomic aspect to consciousness that resists the idea of being split into two parts.

Another aspect is that it is very attractive to take consciousness out of the physical realm and cast the brain as a holographic representation of a system that exists in a higher state of reality. That seems to solve a lot of our problems as we're no longer dependent upon a colony of cells for our existence. The problem of how such a system can attain consciousness does not go away though, we simply move the problem to a higher dimension. We still don't know how it could come into being.

The fact is that consciousness appears to come into being around us all of the time. It appears to gradually grow in babies as they become aware of the world around them. At between three and four years old (for most children) something clicks inside them and they realise that thing in the mirror is themselves. Some people will claim to have memories before this, but if your think back to the origins of your own consciousness it will probably be at this age where you start to become conscious. So what is it? I think therefore I am, but what is I? I am convinced that I am indivisible and there can only be one of me, but at the same time I exist as a series of thoughts inside a colony of biological cells.

A great problem and needs more explanation than describing it as a logic loop.

As a medical student, I can tell everyone that memories are formed by specific "proteins" that stay long term in our brains. Consciousness is completely situated within our brains, you take a hit with a spear in the head and you're done. Does consciousness move on when the body dies? That's a question with the philosopher rather than the physician! =D

I think...... therefore you exist, without my thought you don't exist. Beyond that, it's what's called the 'Soul', the Spirit, but atheists will never grasp that concept. To think outside of a creator is ......... you know what, I'm talking to the wind.. so why bother. Those with religious knowledge will be the only ones who will know. But for the rest, life is just an exercise in futility. You live, you die, nothing. But are you so sure?

Considering that Buddhist monks are able to rewire, and in other ways completely control brain activity. What is doing the controlling? Can a computer design an entirely new operating system and then install it replacing windows?

Maybe somebody already said this, but in my opinion the brain may be nothing more than a device such as an antenna catching radio waves and interpreting them through different parts of our bodies such as nerves and organs. We need our brain to be able to interpret the "invisible" and visible data coming at us. While the radio may not play any music without being plugged into an electrical outlet, it doesn't mean that the radio waves don't exist, it only means that the radio isn't plugged in. In that way the input around us always exists, but to hear and experience that input, our brain must fully function to be able to receive that information.

It's a lot more complicated than that, of course, but until I'm proven wrong, that's the way I see it.