HPOC
There are at least two interpretations of the question. First, “can consciousness be explained by physics currently?” and second, “will consciousness ever be explained by physics?”
A succinct answer to the first question is: No. Not yet. The most honest answer to the second is: Maybe some day, maybe never.
Most scientists appear to believe that consciousness will eventually be explained. Some think it’s already been done. Mark Solms has a great book, “The Hidden Spring” in which he basically claims we have an explanation already. I disagree, but I still think it’s a great book.
I think there’s been real progress recently, but there are still serious gaps. (One could argue the same about abiogenesis — we still have gaps in our understanding of how chemistry created biology — but I don’t think those gaps are nearly so serious. I expect we’ll understand abiogenesis in detail soon.)
I understand why many think there “must” be a physical explanation, but the question is too important to accept guesses or handwaving. We’ll just have to wait.
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Then again, if consciousness is ever understood and modeled, or turns out to be an inevitable artifact of some subset of brains we eventually model with sufficient accuracy, AI w/AC (Artificial intelligence with an artificial consciousness plug-in) we'd have a man-made brain emulation platform that no doubt, exploits physics; thus we'd have to have artificial psychologists to perform preventative maintenance or fault isolation — and they'd probably be physicists — possibly future QM gurus who understand how a subatomic particle interferes with itself, or changes its quantum state before it could have been deviously altered by our conscious design intent, such as to counter our conscious attempt to trick it into behaving as if it had no consciousness itself (re: delayed choice quantum erasure experiment).
Having said that, it's orders of magnitude more likely that consciousness itself is a manifestation of physics as biological systems apply it, rather than consciousness being some kind of voodoo region of the electromagnetic spectrum all cleverly stuffed in a hitherto overlooked ghostly spectral niche just a few nm of wavelength wide. In other words, consciousness is physics and so is psychology the study thereof; we just don't get a lot of shrinks answering to a call for papers on the topic.
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I still submit that the mind is a product of a complex interaction of biological elements, each behaving according to the laws of physics, including chemical reactions and electron exchanges. If the brain is a physical system, then how can consciousness itself come from anything else other than the physics of that system?
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Subjective experience is just that subjective. It doesn’t mean it exists. For example take color: it’s not inherent in light or any of its properties. It’s a fabrication of the brain as are MANY other things. Now you could say the fabrication is real but that’s unsatisfactory for many people when it comes to mind, soul, consciousness as it indicates that it without the brain it isn’t really there.
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There actually is a theory of consciousness that is in fact measurable in the brain; it is called Integrated Information theory; also known as Phi. There are two excellent books that describe IIT; the first is Sizing Up Consciousness by Massimini and Tononi, and PHI by Tononi
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Consciousness appears to be mainly a combination of present sensory experience plus memories of past sensory experiences. Sensory experience and capture is not so mysterious, cameras do it all the time. I think Prof Daniel Dennett takes the same view, and he has written a lot of books on the subject.
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Roger Penrose has demonstrated that consciousness is not computable which appears to be consistent with it being a foundational property (in some way) of the Cosmos.
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Consciousness is the connection between a life form and the universe. Life is not a spectator of the universe. It is an integral part of the universe. The common denominator between life forms on Earth and the universe is the electromagnetic field. Variations in photon wavelengths define the structure of the universe for life's sense neurons. “Awareness” is this sensing of photon wavelengths that activate genetically constructed electrochemical systems operating in a life form, creating its behavior. The universe is structured by the electromagnetic field; awareness is the sensing of this structure.
Consciousness is not limited to the HomoSapiens species unless the Sapiens defines it as such. Consciousness is a feature of life's biochemical existence. Sapiens is unique in that its biochemistry enables it to sense itself. If this self-sensing is its definition of consciousness, it is just being selfish
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Consciousness is probably just our own pattern-recognition software recognizing its own patterns in an observable feedback loop. Meta-cognition, if you will.
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Evolution is a phenomenon.
The advanced brain develops advanced mental power.
The driving forces can include two possible agents:
1, A natural agent: the environment pushes the species to evolve further to have more advanced brain and brain power.
2, A supernatural agent: the supernatural being causes the environmental changes, the species evolving, and mutating. So that the species develops further and with advanced mental power. This is also called God-induced evolution.
Evolutionists claim that since the natural agent is sufficient to do the job and therefore is the sole truth of evolution. Apparently this is a bold assumption, thus a speculation.
Albert Einstein had an agnostic view and he probably noticed this bold speculation and therefore disagreed with those atheist
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Surely it is possible that eventually - when realization dawns that consciousness is perhaps not merely a physically produced phenomenon - that science can step into the realms of the (Labelled) non-physical.
There is plenty of indication that consciousness can exist and function beyond reliance on brain function, in NDE descriptions. Unless science can address all aspects of what reality actually is, it remains a farcical endeavor!
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quora
I have found over my many years here on earth that those who pass usually do not appear in your dreams until they know you are not going to suffer seeing them and waking with that feeling of renewed loss. You must heal from the grief before a visit will take place. Your loved one wants you to be happy again and knows that coming to you too soon would slow that process down. Take care of yourself, eat right, meditate, exercise and do what you can to honor your partners time here on earth. You will be pleasantly surprised one night to find that he will come. In the meantime, watch for other signs. A very common experience is to see a bird appear at the window. Particularly Cardinals. They often come to let you know that your loved one has passed and is watching over you from the other side. I pray that you find peace.
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Since many of the comments below reference terms like “emergent property” and the “hard problem” let me digress, and in doing so ultimately address the question.
Consciousness, in a broad sense is something that we experience in ourselves and infer to obtain in some subset of other living things, such as ( for sake of argument) higher animals. In a rough sense, and at the risk of some circularity, we can think of the state of being conscious as the having of a mind. Now taking mind in this broad sense, it seems a little strange to ask about mind being an attribute of matter, as what we generally mean by mind includes all kinds of things that we attribute more to nervous systems and the creatures that have them. But let’s break things down, and in doing so we will invoke one of the more useful distinctions in recent philosophy of mind, that of the “hard vs easy problem” of consciousness. This distinction, introduced by the philosopher David Chalmers, has succeeded in focusing and clarifying what we are asking about when we ask questions about consciousness.
To start, let’s describe (not explain!) consciousness , and for sake of simplicity let’s limit the discussion to humans, recognizing that the distinctions in play likely apply to many other creatures such as dogs, cats, bunny rabbits etc. As a start we can say that consciousness is that phenomenon that includes our thinking, having emotions, having sensations, reporting on things, reporting on ourselves, taking in information, communicating, remembering, forgetting, learning, loving, hating, enjoying, considering, reacting to, understanding, not understanding, discriminating etc. You get the idea. Now the thing is this. We can take all this stuff, and seem to characterize it in terms of input and output to a system. So for example, conversing can be analyzed as verbal information going in, and coherent, relevant verbal output coming forth. Sensing can be understood as being in the presence of an external stimulus - noise, light, physical contact, odor - and now either reacting (behaving, reporting etc) in some coherent manner, or being disposed to react at a later time. Being in an emotional state, “happy” can be understood as reacting and producing verbal reports, acting in a certain way and exhibiting certain kinds of facial expressions that fall into certain categories and by which, in observing them, we conclude that someone is in fact happy, or conversely sad or in pain. Now we can go on and on in this manner and account for everything we see in living things that we believe to be conscious. That is, we can characterize everything in terms of observable events, even if the account is very complex. And of course, the fact that we can do this is what allows us to have such disciplines as psychology or psychiatry. Now if we take this to one conclusion, it would seem that in principle we could (even if currently far beyond our technological reach) build a robot, an automaton, that perfectly duplicated the behavior of a live human (think of the Data character on Star Trek). Now suppose we accomplished this, and suppose the simulation was so good that it could fool us, (for those that are familiar with it, the so-called Turing Test) I.e. we could hang out with this robot and think it was a real person. Now coming back to Chalmers’ easy/hard problem distinction, in creating this robot we would have solved the easy problem of consciousness. That is, we would have worked out all the input/output and functionsl relationships needed - the software, if you will - to produce observable human bevahior and psychology. Now let’s bring back the question of emergence. At this point we could safely say that the psychological properties that this robot exhibited would be emergent properties, in that they are not to be found in any individual components of the hardware that make up its robot brain. Instead, they are realized at a higher level of description that is the whole. This is analogous to to liquidity as emergent at the level of description of large ensembles of water molecules. So in an analogous manner, were we to create an artificial mind of this sort, where the full range of human psychology would “emerge” from vast ensembles of synthetic circuitry, we would now see how mind can be an emergent property of brains.
Now clearly this would be a monumental achievement. But in something of a cheek in tongue sense, Chalmers calls it “easy” in that it is “simply” a matter of facing up to and unraveling the enormous complexity, extreme as it may be. But on this view a second problem yet remains: the hard problem, and the spirit of that problem is reflected when the layperson asks “but does the Robot feel anything?”. Here is the hard problem: We can go about the business of neurobiology - in an effort that is informed and enriched by cognitive science, AI etc - and continue to work towards figuring out all the processing that allows coherent human behavior and psychology to stream out of a brain receiving information that penetrates that bony skull through the spinal cord and cranial nerves. And we are in fact slowly doing that, and gradually beginning to piece things together. Moreover, in taking on this research program (in the broad sense) we have implicitly accepted what might be called an assumption of psycho-neuronal correspondence, where we expect to continue on a path- however long - where we will continue to find the underlying neuronal processes, circuitry and networks that account for everything that we can observe humans doing-from walking down the street and gracfully negotiating obstacles, to yelling out in anger or waxing poetic over a sunset, to reporting on their subjective experience, as when saying”I am in pain”. But the key word here is observe. We can observe this stuff in others as we would in a sophisticated robot. (We could even have a robot wired and “programmed” in such a way it that cries out in pain if we dismantle it!) But something else seems to be going on in us as well. We very much seem to also be experiencing this stuff from the inside, from the 1st person, where “it is like something” to be in these states.
Suppose we observe a simple creature writhing in pain. Suppose also we are in some distant future where we had a far more complete neurobiology. Now imagine we observe the creatures nervous system using very sophisticated functional imaging. We see all the noxious inputs to its nervous system, we observe output directing its movements in escape behavior, we even trace memory stores retrieving information from internal maps of its environment to facilitate efforts to escape, we see memory traces forming, such that this event and associate circumstance can recalled to avoid the painful stimulimin the future. We may even see neouronal maps of the organism as a whole, implying a representation of the organism to itself, allowing its internal states to register that the whole is in a state of distress. We can go on and on reaching deeper levels of organization. But with all this we might still ask, “but is this organism actually feeling anything?” In the language of philosophy of mind, or consciousness studies, with such a question we would be asking if the organism had private subjective states or 1st person phenomenality or phenomenology. We might also equivalently ask if we could attribute so-called “qualia” to that organism.
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining qualia. Qualia are the the particular individual feelings of what it is like to be a conscious system as felt from the inside, from the first person subjective side. So if the organism from our example had “pain qualia” that would mean that there was in fact a subjective occurrence of pain, that it felt like something to the organism, and where that feeling like something, and what that is actually like (see Thomas Nagel “what it is like to be a bat”) could only be known by the organism in question. It is also the reason we might feel compassion for the creature.
There are as many examples of qualia as there are states of mind. Color qualia provide a particular concrete example. When staring at the blue of the sky, a very specific and private subjective “what blue looks like” seems very much to be present to us. This is blue qualia. Now the problem is this. What in our neurobiology can possibly explain how and why this is occurs. Our neurobiology can in principle explain all the observables and other reportables: what we associate blue with, why it’s our favorite color, when we first saw it, when we say we are seeing it vs when we say we are not, how the networks that internally represent blue objects link to our linguistic centers so that we can call up the word “blue”, and on and on. But how in all this elaboration of input output and functional neuronal relationships does the purely subjective blueness of blue come into the account, I.e. blue qualia.
To be more concretely directed to the heart of the hard problem, I am going to borrow from the philosopher Frank Jackson (google Mary the blind neurobiologist) and ask the following question: how would a fully colorblind neurobiologist - I.e. one who saw entirely in black and white - ever come known what blue qualia is like by studying human brains? The problem this question poses captures the hard problem, which is equivalently the problem of how of to explain qualia.
Whatever position we take on the hard problem (see later in this essay), understanding what it is helps clear up a frequent confusion that that recurs all too often. Specifically, this is the incorrect claim that neurobiology is somehow weighing in on all this. In avoiding this, what is critical to understand is that our current neurobiological research program can only address (and there is a long very long way to go in just doing that) the so-called easy problem. The reason here can be made clear, and involves understanding the so-called Explanatory Gap. Our neurobiology looks at various aspects of the 3rd person observable stuff and finds (as experimental methods increase in sophistication) deeper and deeper levels neurobiological correlates that obtain. This is the easy problem. The hard problem emerges when we ask how we can take all those structure function accounts and squeeze an account of the what it is like of subjective experience, I.e. qualia , out of the mix. As David Chalmers would point out, every conceivable neurobiological explanation that one offers of any behavioral, psychological, cognitive , emotive, etc. event is still completely consistent with that occurring in a flesh and blood robot, I.e. in the absence of qualia or subjective states. That is, there is nothing in the neurobiological explanation or account that guarantees that it actually “feels like something” to be the system in that state for whom the structure function account applies. Moreover it is in no way clear what such an account could possibly be like, I.e. how it could cross this explanatory gap and, using the Frank Jackson example, allow our blind neurobiologist to know color qualia, and thereby know what colors actually look like. Now notice how including subjective accounts into a research program does not solve the problem and cross the explanatory gap. So for example, scanning a brain-even at a level that fully describes neural networks in the visual cortex - while a subjective report is issued, such as “I am seeing blue” or equivalently “I am experincing blue qualia”, will not acomplish this, since all it can do is determine that when V1 (the visual cortex) is in such and such a state blue is seen. The account could even follow and explain neuronal events all the way down to the verbal subjective report above. But the Hard Problem is that none of this translates into account of the “what it is like” of specific subjective quality of blueness as it obtains, for exalmple, distinct from redness. None of this would seem to cross the explanatory gap and allow the blind neurobiologist to know blue qualia, even when the full neurobiological account is known.
Now what then do we make of the hard problem, and can we bring it all the way back - after this long digression - to the question of emergence vs fundamental property? Now at the risk of oversimplifing, there are two fundamental ways to go here, and each lies at the opposite end of the current highly polarized debate. The first of these is what some have called Type A Materialism, or eliminitivism. This approach, while highly counterintuitive to many, is rather tidy both philosophicaly and neurobiologicaly. The stance here is that qualia quite simply don’t exist. The eliminitivist argues that our insistence that there are these fundamentally inner private subjective states -where the particular and distinct “what it is actually like to the conscious agent” qualities obtain - is in fact an illusion of sorts. Nothing of this sort obtains at all. Moreover fictional characters like data -who look and act exactly like us - are in fact no different from us in this sense. In other words, our private, fundamentally hidden inner world of subjective qualities is just as non existent as his. But why then do we speak of qualia? On their view, our cognition, including non conscious (in their sense non reportable) cognition is so incredibly rich, that we are led to a false belief that a purely subjective side to it obtains. The analogy is often made to what was once known as Elan Vital. At one time life and living things where felt to involve some special thing, a life force or life energy that made living things fundamentally different from mechanical things. And, extending the analogy, the argument is made that we might have spoken of a “Hard Problem of life”, where in addition to explaining reproduction, growth, feeding and - in the case of some living things - locomotion, etc, we had to somehow also explain the Elan Vital. We now know however that our prior intuition that there is such a thing as Elan Vital was misguided, we were fooled -by the incredible biological complexity of living things - to believe there was something more than mere structure and function to explain. And so it is for the eliminitavist with qualia, the hard problem and the explanatory gap. Once we completely unravel the easy problem (on their view mislabeled, since it really is the “only” problem) we will see that there is in fact no hard problem, no explanatory gap, and no qualia. On this view qualia and the subjective private side of mind are neither emergent nor fundamental. They simply, like Elan Vital, don’t exist. What is emergent however is our strong tendency to claim that they are there, as if present to us in some undeniable self verifying fashion. So on this view the blind Neurobiologist will, after fully decoding the brain, realize that there was no purely subjective side of blueness to learn about, and he or she will in fact see, in neurobiological terms, why we are so compelled to think that there is. Proponents of this view include Daniel Dennett and Paul and Patricia Churchland.
Now at the other end of the debate are the Naturalistic Dualists. These individuals argue that qualia are real, the explanatory gap is real, and the hard problem is intractable given our current ontology (the basic furniture of reality upon which we build physics). They argue that there surely is a fundamentally subjective side to reality, and they argue that this must be built into our explanatory framework if we are ever going to build a full science of consciousness. Now one point of confusion comes up here that must be addressed. There is often the claim that such contemporary versions of dualism are Cartesian and also at odds with the current progress of neurobiology. They are not. Cartesian Dualism 1) made claim to a mind stuff , a metal substance - a ghost in the machine - that existed along with extended matter. Contemporary dualism does not make this overly strong claim. 2) Catertesian Dualism held that mind stuff could at a some level work in ways independent of the machinery of the brain, thereby violating our current held view that all metal events, down to the smallest level of romantic detail, correspond to events in the brain (perhaps also violating physical conservation laws!) Naturalistic Dualists do not make this claim. They grant the progress and validity of our neurobiological research, and the one to one correspondence between mental and neuronal/phyisical events.
There is also the claim that Naturalistic Dualists are claiming that qualia, the hard problem and the explanatory gap are somehow beyond science. They are not saying this. Instead they are saying that our ontology must be braodened to include subjective states as somehow being fundamental, and then build them into future neurobiological explanations. An analogy to physics helps here, in that physics has braodened its ontology at various points in its history - e.g. fields, and more recently spacetime. Similarly, if more radically, Naturalistic Dualists argue for a broadening of ontology to make room for subjective states.
Getting back to the question of emergence vs fundamentality, on the Naturalistic Dualist view subjectivity is not emergent, as liquidity is to water molecules (statistical mechanics is part of what bridges that gap there), but fundamental. Proponents of this view include David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel.
Now there is a middle ground of sorts that a number of neurobiologists sort of default to. Philosophicaly, however this gets quite technical, as it involve very formal discussions about the nature of metaphysical possibility, as this is something of a have it both ways position. Worth noting is that many who default to this position are not sensitive to the complexities that it entails. (Eliminativism and Naturalist Dualism are in many ways far simpler positions to take). The position here is sometimes called non reductive physicalism or type b materialism. The idea here is that the Hard Problem, qualia, and the explanatory gap are taken seriously, seen for what they are and not dismissed. However there is a refusal to broaden ontology. And this is what gets it into very conceptualy diffcult territory, as it is in no way clear how one can have it both ways here. The empirical way out, and hope of the non reactive materialist, is that somehow concepts and neurobiological research will evolve to a point where we see how qualia obtain as an emergent phenomenon when large masses of neurons work together as they do in our brain. So just as statistical mechanics allowed us to see how liquidity emerges from water molecules without needing to expand our ontology to include liquidity as a fundamental category of reality, some future neurobiology will cross the explanatory gap and do the same for qualia, even it is currently beyond our ability to foresee how such an account could obtain. Proponents of such a view include Brian Loar, Chris Hill & Brian McLaughlin. A final interesting spin on all this is the position of Colin McGuinn who argues that an account of how qualia obtain is there, but is as far beyond our cognitive ability as calculus is for dogs. In any event. Hope this helps, and hope my position is not too evident. Ima a NDist!
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Unfortunately NDE's are subjective and personal. Science can only make educated guesses about the “physical” and has done so successfully for 400 years. I don't see the same progress with regard to understanding NDE's and the nonphysical (whatever that could be).
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I don’t see how you explain that a human lying in an operating theatre eyes closed unconscious to all intents having no sensory input, is having an experience they describe as ’Out of body” where they are observing their body lying below them and the actions and words of the medical staff hurrying to revive them or doing their medical procedures. (All these observational awarenesses being corroborated later by the medical staff involved) and also seeing their relatives and loved ones in completely separate sometimes distant locations (This also corroborated) can be explained by brain activity? You can cling to your view that the brain is required for the operation of consciousness if you prefer to This kind of awareness by patients monitored as near-death or having died, suggests otherwise
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Synchronicity by Carl Jong says different. Our body is a planet of cells, all talking to one another chemically. Their lives are governed by our collective choices. When you speak, how do those words assemble from the thought process? There is a subconscious mechanism governing all of this and we’ll never know, fore we would only screw that up too!
Just understanding why a blow to the head loses consciousness is impossible without understanding it. We cannot even model it because we don't understand it. Even then, I doubt we'd know what makes it come back, let alone what's going on in the interim.
Secondly, there appears to be a subconscious processing that is somehow always engaged in a golden problem (perhaps based on the degree of conscious effort to solve it) which upon completion or reaching some understanding lacking before, manifests as an “aha moment” in which the solution or path towards one is suddenly associated in the conscious mind, even though the conscious mind wasn't even pondering the problem at the time.
To me, feel-good paths, negative feedback paths etc., Don't have any wits per se; but they work towards problem solving at rudimentary levels. So the hard problem begins at the aha moment. Given our memories are hyper-associative, I like the concept of a new understanding manifesting the aha moment.
Lastly, if only self-awareness was as simple as training a learning model with “I think… therefore I am.”. The problem there is, what part of the model actually cares about itself. It appears ego and self preservation are paramount in terms of fundamental existence. Sort of like hitting the snooze button repeatedly because the only way to enjoy sleep is to fall into it. A change of state… not the state itself. Note that nobody likes being rudely awakened. So the antithesis is there.
My short answer is it must be physics — what else could it be?
AI has reached grand master level in centuries-old games of Chess and Go, and consistently beating humans even in fighter jet dogfighting.
Yet the processes going on in terms of quasi analog states of 100s of thousands of supposed neural emulators with millions of interconnecting influences, millions of times per second on an AI supercomputing platform far exceeds the capacity for the system architects themselves to halt and examine the current states and predict from whence it came, let alone where it's going, then it's not a big stretch to say that physics as biological systems apply it at a molecular level, are certainly capable of beating humans at understanding them — I believe AI will be required to understand consciousness itself — at least to prove that consciousness is simply the physics of brain function.
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The whole trouble is that almost all people think consciousness is just one. Consciousness is of 6 types, eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, tongue-consciousness, body-consciousness and mind-consciousness.
Consciousness arise when an object meets any of these faculties. Supposing eye see an object and there arise eye-consciousness and the three together lead to contact and contact to feelings and perception.
There is nothing called a consciousness. Take fire as a simile. There is no just fire? with wood it is wood-fire, with petrol it is petrol-fire, with tree bushes it is bush-fire etc.
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No, the brain is like a T.V. Set…it is a receiver of the ‘broadcast’ of consciousness.
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Emergent property is the Achille' heel for reductionism.
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Consciousness is everywhere. The human brain doesn’t cause consciousness, but it does provide the unique conscious experiences.
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The brain is a kind of transducer. It transforms the physical world into spiritual world and the spiritual world into the physical world. Comparable with a microphone/ speaker for sound or a camera/screen for images.
A loudspeaker does not speak. But it transforms the electrical carrier for the spoken word”” into the physical carrier (air) for the “spoken word. The same way like our ear does and our brain does. Consiousness is not from this world but can be influenced by this world in the brains by drugs. And for sound it is comparable with adding some back ground music to the spoken word before it will be transduced by a speaker.
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The brain is a kind of transducer. It transforms the physical world into spiritual world and the spiritual world into the physical world. Comparable with a microphone/ speaker for sound or a camera/screen for images.
A loudspeaker does not speak. But it transforms the electrical carrier for the spoken word”” into the physical carrier (air) for the “spoken word. The same way like our ear does and our brain does. Consiousness is not from this world but can be influenced by this world in the brains by drugs. And for sound it is comparable with adding some back ground music to the spoken word before it will be transduced by a speaker.
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There are monistic and dualistic solutions of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. When we try to find an answer for question “ can consciousness in the brain be explained by physics?” - we attempt to find monistic solution.However, when we are assuming that Mind and Brain are very different by nature, we, correspondingly , try to find dualistic solution of that problem. Idealists ( including Quantum Idealists of the 20th century), nevertheless, have developed another kind of monistic solution of the Hard Problem: they suggest that there is no such problem at all — our reality is always observer dependent phenomena, correspondingly, if even we are facing with some kind of “ objects” of some sort of “ reality”, we have deal always merely with our consciousness. Hence, Cogito ergo sum monistic principle is formulated. Eugene Wigner, famous quantum physicist, called this sort of solution as “ quantum solipsism” ( please, see his Remarks, 1961), however, contemporary philosophers ( Chalmers, for instance) and scientists ( Penrose ) reject such sort of monistic solution
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Yes, if you take the broader view of including information theory in the definition of physics. Consciousness can be explained by information theory. I can tell you what consciousness is: it’s the feedback of information across the brain. Wait, you say that doesn’t make sense. To understand consciousness you first need to understand that everything you know and are aware of is the product of brain activity, and is 100% subjective. You are not aware of any objective information what so ever. You do not have a conscious being in your head observing the world. It is all one thing. The feeling that there is an intelligence in your head that is looking around and making judgements is an illusion. The brain takes in information and constructs a model of the world. Your world model is used by other parts of your brain to make decision such as finding food, walking, looking for a mate, and so on. You have the feeling that the world model made by your brain is real, but it is not: it is just information. When you think of warmth, light, solid, liquid, love, electrons, neurons, photons, anything is is not real. It is part of the world model made by your brain.
Once you understand the subjective nature of consciousness, take a closer look at what information is. Consider adding two binary numbers 001 and 011 the answer is 100. The information is the pattern; not the ink, not the light and dark pixels on the display. It’s only the pattern. Information has no physical form. Likewise, in your brain the pattern of neurons firing is the information, it is not the neurons. So your consciousness cannot be explained by the electromagnetic theory, quantum field theory, and so on. Your consciousness can be explained by information theory.
What causes this feeling of being, of seeing and hearing, and so on. It’s the feedback of information. The brain evolved as a prediction device with reasoning mechanisms for acting on the predictions. The brain does this by building a information model of the world and running the model forward in time. Then as new information arrives from your senses the the model is corrected and updated. The mixture of new information, updating and extrapolation information causes the sensation of consciousness.
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Dennettian theater affirms beliefs in physicalist notions of a material mind and self or Consciousness that correlates with corresponding neuronal centers and activities in brain.
Thinkers like Chalmers counter this through posing the Hard Oroblem of Consciousness which questions neurological mind model arguments.
Subjective domain of feelings and emotions has qualia space.
Physicists like Penrose and Pauli,psychologists like Jung and James,and even neurologists like Tononi and Koch think that mind goes beyond brain,and subscribes to Mystic notions of panpsychism, as also Philosophers like Whitehead and cognivists like Kleereman
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Sure, why not? Consciousness is the behavior of a particular kind of computer, one that happens to be implemented as a neural network. Nothing about those neurons is unexplainable by physics, and they don’t gain some kind of “magic” by comprising a large system.
This is really the crux of the so-called “mind-body problem”. It’s a topic that has occupied a lot of philosophers before the advent of computers. Many philosophers, still talking about it today, don’t seem to realize that it is obsolete, since it was only ever motivated by then-implausibility that matter could think. Of course, “matter thinking” is pretty much the definition of computers - everything changed once we started building large-scale symbolic machines.
So yes: there is no evidence related to consciousness that requires invoking the supernatural. It’s physics all the way down.
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This is similar to asking if grapes are a product of the vine or a product of the solar system. Both are true.
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What is consciousness. Many laypeople picture it as a disembodied cloud that has free will. But we often have a blind spot about ourselves, and therefore many have proposed that consciousness is something very different from what it intuitively seems. That is, it is an illusion, which doesn’t mean that it’s nonexistent, but that it’s different from what it seems. See for example books by Daniel Dennett
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It is not the brain but how we do manage our brain. Brain is matrix. Questioning is the key. There are many other keys
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That speculation will have to wait on a lot more research.
The interior of the microtubules is such a small diameter that only quantum events could take place inside them. That is true enough, but the question remains—even with quantum events going on inside those microtubules, the question still remains: Is there any mechanism that allows quantum events inside the tubules to interact with the “real world”?
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Consciousness is the label for the mysterious and invisible metaphorical LIGHT that illuminates all of our perceptions namely seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and thinking.
We do not really have the faintest clue as to how perceptions actually happen but we know for sure that they do happen spontaneously without any selection.
You may be wondering “Why! The science text books explains everything very clearly!”.
To make my point clear please focus on your sense of sight.
Do you feel your eyeballs adjusting themselves to light and distance?
Do you feel your retina, neurons, optic nerve or the brain?
Do you feel the brain interpreting the optic signal?
What does it mean to say that the brain interprets? Is that really saying anything?
Finally who or what is it that actually sees? Is it the eyes, the brain or what?
We do not have the faintest clue but seeing is self-luminous and undeniable!
The same holds good with all the perceptions.
They are all somehow happening but we do not know how from our own direct knowledge.
What the science text book says is secondary knowledge and secondary knowledge has its own place in our life.
What is THAT mysterious LIGHT that feels so ALIVE and INTELLIGENT hidden in all of our perceptions?
This LIGHT does not appear to have any limiting boundaries nor any location.
This LIGHT is undeniable, self-luminous, self-evident, nameless, formless, dimensionless, non-local, non-temporal, impersonal, indestructible (because it is formless and dimensionless), causeless, beginning-less, endless and universal.
This LIGHT is so intimate that IT feels like the very core of our BEING.
How do we prove this LIGHT if it is invisible?
Let us take the analogy of the eye.
The eye can see the entire creation but it cannot see itself!
The one and only way for the eye to know about its own existence is to intuit thus “I can see the entire creation and therefore I AM!”.
In exactly the same fashion CONSCIOUSNESS is a non-material reality that has no way of perceiving ITSELF but IT can only intuit IT’s own reality thus “I can perceive the entire cosmos and therefore I AM!”.
CONSCIOUSNESS recognizes ITSELF through a sophisticated perceiving mechanism like your own body.
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While the nature of consciousness is not yet fully understood, medical research has shown that it’s an emergent property of the brain due to the complex biochemical and electrical activity between the trillions of brain cell connections, called synapses, acting as connected neural networks.
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the brain is necessary for consciousness, but is not sufficient for it.
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It is consciousness that makes you study physics. It is consciousness that is responsible for existence of any entity. Consciousness is associated with the mind. Physics can study only quantifiable entities like space, time, matter and energy. Consciousness is not quantifiable. As such physics can not study consciousness, which also does not exist at any physical level
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Consciousness is the subject and this universe is the object within that consciousness.
Consciousness is the source and universe is the derivative of consciousness.
Consciousness is eternal and universe is temporary in nature.
Relationship between consciousness and universe is the same relationship as it is between you and your dream.
Universe is in the dream of consciousness and for that reason freewill is an illusion.
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You are not your brain. You are only a thought “me” occuring sometimes. Just like the thought “I have a brain”. Look very carefully, and you will be surprised how obvious it is.
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Neither !
Brain , a neuronal mass of flesh- however important and wonderful it may be- is a part of universe. In this question it needs no special consideration.
You are , in a way, very near the Truth, just reverse the phrases to hit the bulls eye.
Universe is the illusory product of Consciousness.
An illusory thing can never be the cause of a real thing ; however it can be the cause of another illusion at best.
Consciousness is always singular never plural, grammatically a noun- the name of a ‘ thing’ however intangible be, can never be denied. Denial of this ‘thing’ is denial of his own existence- an absurd proposition in admissible in both formal science of logic and also in philosophy. Consciousness is indestructible, indivisible, all pervading, yes ,all pervading even in the intra atomic space.
Does this fit into your conception of God ? If fits you will be happy and me too. If it doesn't please investigate and come up with an alternative.
The scope of question doesn't need and permit even, further elaboration.
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ECB
Consciousness is the form of formless mind,
Individual consciousness is part of Cosmic consciousness.
Mind and therefore Consciousness depends on one element- Space-ether.
Through Space mind perverted cosmos. Cosmos is 95% darkness.
Consciousness pervades Dark matter
It uses and exist on Space element.
That omnipresent Consciousness is formless Almighty-God.
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Consciousness as a State of Matter
We examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles. If such principles can identify conscious entities, then they can help solve the quantum factorization problem: why do conscious observers like us perceive the particular Hilbert space factorization corresponding to classical space (rather than Fourier space, say), and more generally, why do we perceive the world around us as a dynamic hierarchy of objects that are strongly integrated and relatively independent? Tensor factorization of matrices is found to play a central role, and our technical results include a theorem about Hamiltonian separability (defined using Hilbert-Schmidt superoperators) being maximized in the energy eigenbasis. Our approach generalizes Giulio Tononi's integrated information framework for neural-network-based consciousness to arbitrary quantum systems, and we find interesting links to error-correcting codes, condensed matter criticality, and the Quantum Darwinism program, as well as an interesting connection between the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of time.
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Consciousness is a mental, that is, informational phenomenon. Physical media can encode, decode, store, and transmit information. That describes how DNA carries the blueprint of a living organism, and how a computer hard drive stores operating system, programs, and data on a computer. If the information moves through the system on paths of collateral energy, then we have an information system. Evolution, biological life, computer systems, and human consciousness are all examples of energy-information flowing through physical media.
We do not know what consciousness is. Clearly, it is a quality of information. Beyond that, we play with words we cannot define, words like knowledge, awareness, wisdom, and perhaps even love.
We cannot tell if consciousness arrives from physical forms of physical-energetic-information systems, or if consciousness has some existence either without matter-energy or in energy only. The process of arising from physical matter and the process of embodying in and manifesting in physical matter are identical in terms of the trail of data left for science to examine.
We can seek to understand the interactions of consciousness and life just as we can decode a computer program in an unknown language. But we have no way of examining consciousness itself through scientific means, as science only examines matter and energy.
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What a delicious question. Since science is still clueless about where, and how the origin of consciousness manifests itself, then it's still an academic thought exercise. I, myself am a “bottom — up" thinker. That is, I believe that the vast majority of all natural phenomenon originates in the sub — atomic Planck realm. Including, (I believe), the origin of consciousness. How to connect the Neuro — chemical processes in the brain to the quantum world is still unknown. I can't even begin to imagine the answer to such a transcendental question.
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