Biology of the mind: Is consciousness merely the result of evolution, or something more?

reply to post by smithjustinb


Essentially you are asking if we are indeed more than the sum of our parts. My answer to that question has to be yes although said answer is more of a feeling/gut instinct than a logical conclusion.

"Cogito ergo sum" or "i think therefore i am" pretty much sums up consciousness although i imagine it's rather a more complex animal than we are lead to believe.

I think we all have our own little spark of consciousness within our physical brain-our brain and body is a perfect transciever;it transmits and recieves signals,like a shortwave radio.
But-Consciousness also exists outside us,as part of a bigger energy field which we can and do tap into maybe without knowing we do.
And other animals,all of them have a degree of perception of that field of energy,maybe even more than we modern humans.
That field may be described as the soul of us all.
And it is eternal in ways we attempt to describe with our religions.

But,what the heck do I know,a halfbreed Celt in the windswept mountains of Wales.

A summation of the aggregates that constitute our brain. That seems like the most logical answer at the moment.

andy06shake
reply to post by freedomSlave

 

What about when we are asleep?

When we dream we are in an unconscious state(R.E.M sleep), but from our perspective we are still conscious. How do we know that our experience of consciousness while awake is any more real than when we dream?

en.wikipedia.org...

edit on 24-2-2014 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

I would tend to see that more as a seperation of the consciousness from the normal mind and body process, but I believe that though the mind is resting or undergoing maintainance if you like the consciousness itself is still present, maybe the senses and even thought's are essentially shut down or running dream scape simulations but the consciousness itself is still there.

reply to post by LABTECH767


I imagine our consciousness is always "there". Wherever "there" maybe is possibly a better question? I also share your assumption that when we dream it is most lightly due to our body's beginning the regeneration/repair process. I think when we dream that our minds essentially are running hypothetical scenarios that ultimately influence our decision making process while we are awake.

Then again I once had a dream where i was a Cheese and Tomato sandwich and the world was trying to take a bite out of me. I don't know that much about symbology but I can see the similarity's with todays world most especially my own.

reply to post by smithjustinb


Out of the 1 trillion or so cells that make up Justin, only about 100bil of them are actually "you". The other 90% of you is made up of various flora and fauna that you live in symbiosis with.

I hope that helps answer your question.

reply to post by andy06shake


Imagine in your mind a jewel with a trillion facets. Each one completely facing away from all others, looking out in its own unique direction. Each face, its own but still part of the whole.

bigfatfurrytexan
reply to post by smithjustinb

 

Out of the 1 trillion or so cells that make up Justin, only about 100bil of them are actually "you". The other 90% of you is made up of various flora and fauna that you live in symbiosis with.

I hope that helps answer your question.

I,or should I say we,have pondered this very fact more than once.

A human is not a single being,more a hive of coexistent micro species-we are mother natures mega borg.
Maybe our consciousness is not all human either-some of the others of which we are made could be influencing our behaviour,our ways.
How are we to know?

Mother Natures Mega Borg are we.

The hard problem of consciousness has puzzled thinkers great and small for millennia. Essentially, it is concerned with answering the following questions,


1. How the subjective experience or qualia emerges and develops characteristics, in the mind.

2. How spatially distributed electrical activity which results from coordinated, synchronous chemical events in the brain forms a unitary event called consciousness.

3. What are thoughts composed of?



A website with some additional information related to this field of inquiry.

Neuro-Quantology

Participant Observation

I doubt the discussions will yield any concrete answers, but they might reveal some important questions. After all, as the late great Douglas Adams so eloquently pointed out, we can't know the right answers until we know the right questions.

For my part, I'm still looking for the correct answer to the universal question "Why?" -- and I'll admit I'm hoping it really isn't "Why not?"

I wonder about the same things. Considering the extraordinarily strange psycho/spiritual events which have occurred over recent years I'm rather of the opinion that everything has a naturalistic explanation and origin. I'm not to sure about anyone elses opinion but the alternative, that everyone lives in the belly of an invisible cosmic whale, just seems so last century.

Consciousness as an engulfing field makes more sense that it being an ephiphenomenon. The brain could only be a receiver. Its really funny that our brain produces consciousness and is not aware of it itself.

andy06shake

At 2:30pm today(Yesterday now), some of the world’s preeminent psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers will discuss the biology of the mind. The discussion, which takes place at The Helix Center in New York, will focus on whether the very human concepts of the mind, consciousness, and self-awareness are merely a function of the mammalian brain’s structure, or whether there’s more to it. By the same measure, the researchers will discuss whether the mind is purely the reserve of humans, or whether it also exists further down the evolutionary scale.


www.youtube.com...=38

edit on 23-2-2014 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

Interesting they are discussing biology of the mind, how do they define MIND? Are they discussing physical brain biology?
If mind is not physical(brain) what biology are they discussing?
Psychologist use just a theory of mind . I wonder if they are all thinking of the same concepts .
There is no set/fixed definition of consciousness [or the mind] these concepts differ in each study.

smithjustinb
reply to post by andy06shake

 

If I and another person switched cells between each other one by one until the other person had all my cells and I had all the other persons cells, would I be aware of myself as the same identity as before, or will I be aware of myself as the identity that once belonged to the person I traded cells with?

What do you think?

Well, there is some truth to that I suppose. Some people who have had organ transplants have had a change in musical tastes, food cravings, and maybe even verbal vocabularies. And these new qualities were in the people who did the donations. The reason for this, is that organs actually have their own sense of information and memories. It's not something only the brain has. It's not something that always happens. But there have been quite a few people out there who have started acting a bit differently after receiving a new organ. Although you are still "you" in the long run, that's for sure.

But trying to transfer individual cells from one person to the next would probably be impossible.

Here's a little read about what I'm talking about.

guardianlv.com...

reply to post by freedomSlave


Although I like everything you posted....plants are the most aggressive killers ever! Walnut trees produce juglones to poison everything around it...chemical warfare amongst plants! But ya I get what ya mean though....

I don't see what's wrong with the idea that a computational unit which reaches a certain critical mass gains some sort of consciousness.

We wouldn't be able to tell if a computer was conscious, simply because its reactions to our stimuli (keyboard strokes, mouse clicks) would be the same with or without consciousness. Consciousness is, of course, distinct from free will.

Our central nervous system is a very complex, albeit spatially and energetically inefficient, computer. Who's to say that consciousness/self-awareness isn't simply a natural effect of the amount of overhead required to compute and process all the data we're simultaneously dealing with?