Where Did Consciousness Come From?

Originally posted by vjr1113
reply to post by YouAreDreaming

 

yea i knew the whole NDE thing was coming, it was inevitable.

yes you can loose consciousness like when you pass out but you are not dead, you are sleeping.

i dont buy NDEs. there are many reasonable answers to those experiences that i would accept before i believe that something supernatural happened, including lying.

edit on 28-9-2011 by vjr1113 because: (no reason given)

NDE, Lucid Dreaming, Out-of-body Experiences are all events that "some" people "experience". What they all share in common is an event where a person is conscious, and self-aware that they exist in some state.

Regardless of what that state is; what is important if we are interested in consciousness is that these altered-states allow for conscious experience in a very real context. One can be conscious when the body is asleep.

How is this possible when many centers of brain-function have slowed or shut down? The frontal temporal lobes, the hyppocampus all shut-down meaning the brain is not storing memory and data. Yet regardless of this brain function loss, a person who is lucid dreaming will be aware of a dream reality that is real, vivid and something they are experiencing.

Could be very useful to read Ouspenky's "The Psichology of mans possible evolution".
www.scribd.com...

He said that Counsciusness is not a function, it's a State.
It has 4th levels.
It has frequency, deep and duration.
It could be developed.


Frami

reply to post by YouAreDreaming


i dont have the answer to you question. the brain is so complex, we are still trying to unlock its secrets. did you notice nothing supernatural was said in your post? it's all in your head. ppl swear they fly when taking psychedelics, doesn't make it so.

also, im aware that ppl can lucid dream, i wish i had the patience to do it. my point was that you cant be aware when your brain isnt working.

Originally posted by vjr1113
reply to post by YouAreDreaming

 

i dont have the answer to you question. the brain is so complex, we are still trying to unlock its secrets. did you notice nothing supernatural was said in your post? it's all in your head. ppl swear they fly when taking psychedelics, doesn't make it so.

I agree, and even this experience you are having relative to reality, the very same reality that I exist in, is something that is also entirely in your head. Even though both you and I exist in a physical-reality composed of atoms, there is no question that we both subjectively experience the same reality but differently.

In a relative way, this subjective experience of reality is how all life, and living systems observe itself in an amazing composition of atoms, energy, chemicals and mind-generated micro-models of reality which is the one that exists in your head. A mind-generated view of reality filtered down by the five senses and dependent on many critical cellular functions to keep generating.

A cellular driven mind-generated model of reality. Dreams are another type of mind-generated models of reality. They too can often appear physical, real and vivid but are lost when we wake up to realize they were "just dreams".

There is something more.

reply to post by YouAreDreaming


What if the brain is just a reality filter...?

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
reply to post by YouAreDreaming

 

What if the brain is just a reality filter...?

We would have to include the whole body really because all of the sensory systems are filtering data from the objective world and sending this to the brain to process. Which is one can look at as natures very own virtual-reality generator. As the way it processes sensory information is very digital and the end result of this biological information processing is a model of reality, that is filtered.

I like to think of the brain as a reality rendering-farm.

Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Beyond that we cannot really say much more. It's clear the it is due to the interaction of a number of systems of within the brain and no single structure. The fact of the matter is, there isn't even a clear cut definition for consciousness. Pretty much all we can conclusively say at this point is consciousness is a function of the brain.

Originally posted by Xcalibur254
Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. Beyond that we cannot really say much more. It's clear the it is due to the interaction of a number of systems of within the brain and no single structure. The fact of the matter is, there isn't even a clear cut definition for consciousness. Pretty much all we can conclusively say at this point is consciousness is a function of the brain.

I have to agree, there is a lot more science and research relative to the science of consciousness. The link to the human-brain is fairly self-evident. We know consciousness is an emergent property of cellular information-processing. A single-cell in the human-body is part of this consciousness system, all cellular participants in a larger scaled-up system.

How does a single neuron contribute a node of consciousness that must scale-up into a larger system where by one is awake and self-aware?

Are single-celled organisms self-aware and conscious?