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Originally posted by Astrocyte
reply to post by Tetrarch42
There doesn't need to be "a consciousness outside of the material brain that exerts it's will on the material brain and activates brain cells that will recall a specific memory..." when the material brain does exactly this
You do realize though that this is a philosophical presupposition, correct?
Those who disagree with the premise that consciousness is just brain function disagree because it isn't very intelligible; it doesn't describe mechanism of action; it simply presumes based on its limited understanding that because the brain can give or take away consciousness, that then means that the brain IS consciousness.
And the argument that it "isn't" a necessary assumption is again, a personal feeling about you define the word "necessary". Does necessary mean that the brain changes consciousness, therefore the brain equals consciousness? Or, does necessary mean that the mental and physical are two completely different things, therefore, consciousness needs to be explained without recourse to the physical. In other words, it's what you find most interesting that determines what you consider necessary. If the idea of a "magical" creation of a new property from nothing more than the collective interactions of trillions of physical neurons sounds reasonable to you, than you will accept the premise that the brain is "all there is" to consciousness; you won't bother wondering further. However, if consciousness - cognition, and value - are things that seem to transcend any physical substance, then you will insist that science is at present incomplete; that the mental must be a basic part to the natural process; from insects, to animals, to humans, the mental is a common property.
Neo-Darwinian evolution does not provide any logical explanation for why the universe should have developed in this way; why did "consciousness" arise when it didn't exist at the beginning? Contemplate that for a second and think how absurd that sounds; that life emerged is strange enough; that creatures with "consciousness" emerged out of that process adds a degree of unintelligibility to the claim "consciousness = brain" that some people have a difficult time accepting.
Scientists already grew a rat brain in a petri dished
I would bet money the U.S. Gov already has a Human Brain grown in a Petri dish connected to quantum super computers under some black ops pentagon black budget operation.
What an ignorant post.
the inferior parietal lobe was 15 percent wider than normal.
First, Einsteins brain was normal sized; the only place which was slightly larger was a part in the parietal lobe - where mathematical reasoning is localized.
Scientists already grew a rat brain in a petri dished umm, no they didn't.
(CNN) -- A Florida scientist has developed a "brain" in a glass dish that is capable of flying a virtual fighter plane and could enhance medical understanding of neural disorders such as epilepsy. The "living computer" was grown from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat's brain and arranged over a grid of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish. The brain cells then started to reconnect themselves, forming microscopic interconnections, said Thomas DeMarse, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida.
I would gladly take that bet. Not only have we not grown a brain, but we still don't even have an appreciable knowledge of the brain; and estimates put that happening some time later on this century or early in the 2100s.