this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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No, it's not. Next question...
Seriously though, doesn't basically every experiment in brain surgery and neuroscience disprove this idea? We know how different structures in the brain contribute to consciousness. We can't explain the mechanism 100%, but that doesn't mean that every piece of matter secretly has some consciousness embedded in it. It's God of the Gaps nonsense.
I'm not against posting stuff like this. Obviously serious people take this idea seriously. Just none of the people taking it seriously study brains.
Altering or tinkering with the substrate will of course alter the ”functioning” of consciousness. This does nothing to demystify or explain its existence; it only proves that it “utilizes” or depends on that substrate.
If you remove the hands of a brilliant guitarist, you haven’t “proven” that musicality is purely a function of hand structure/mechanics.
What exactly is the brain the substrate for? All evidence up to this point indicates that the brain is the thing doing the thinking and feeling.
Without some seriously compelling evidence to the contrary, I'm going to assume you're talking about a soul or some other supernatural idea.
In your example of the guitarist, where would you say musicality actually comes from? I would say the brain, because there is plenty of evidence that brains exist and can be creative.
That's the question, isn't it!
I'm not ascribing anything unknown (for now!) to anything magical, I'm simply convinced that remaining agnostic on these ideas is the only honest position to occupy at this time.
For now, we simply do not know the origins of consciousness. Certainly the brain is at the center of it all, literally, but much of "what it's up to" remains a mystery when it comes to consciousness. Trying to nail it all down (at this point) to biology+physics+whatever reminds me of that old cartoon of a defeated-looking man staring at a giant chalkboard filled with elaborate equations, parted down the middle by the phrase, "and then a miracle occurs..."
If the stuff happening inside your body can't be "nailed down" by biology+physics+whatever, then you're talking about magic whether or not you call it magic.
"What is the brain the substrate for?" Is not a good question to ask because it assumes there is some unknown invisible force acting on the neurons in our heads. Neurons come from an egg fertilized by a sperm, just like every other cell.
Should we ask what the balls are a substrate for, since they are creating the sperm that will one day have consciousness?
(PS thank you for the discussion. It's all in fun and I think this is genuinely interesting.)
I can see how magic appears to be creeping in!
When I think of "magic" in this context, it's the kind of magic that a citizen of the Roman Empire might see at work in viewing a Facetime call on an iPhone. I think the wall we hit in trying to unpack and nail down consciousness is a similar impediment; we simply lack the knowledge, understanding, context, and even language (at least so far) to begin to address it directly.
We are smart enough to get these questions, but not yet able to answer them. I don't think that means we must somehow use our current understanding of a thing to arrive at comforting explanations; instead, I think that this question in particular is forcing us to admit We Don't Know...and can't even fathom what it might take to actually nail it down. The black and white/color thought experiment is a beautiful allusion to what this unknowing is like, and I think that's where we must be comfortable sitting, at least for now!
(PS agreed! Love me a good thoughtful disagreement)
Ok, obviously we don't know the exact mechanism of consciousness and thoughts, no argument there.
You think the belief that my entire self is nothing but a gooey grey organ inside my skull that can be irrevocably damaged by slipping on the floor is comforting?!
Our current understanding of a thing is an interesting way to phrase this. I would argue that our current understanding of a thing is literally the only way we can meaningfully study something. We start with our best current model and go from there. Of course there are sometimes paradigm shifts and big discoveries that seem to come from nowhere, but those are rare, and generally still fit into a wider model for how the universe works. If you don't understand how some function of the brain works, you shouldn't jump to the assumption that biology can't provide an answer. I'm not saying our neurons can't be the receivers for some extra-dimensional consciousness radio, I'm just saying use Occam's Razor.
You seem to be looking at the explanation of consciousness the way people looked at the explanation for the inheritance of traits from parents before we knew anything about genetics: a complete mystery. I think the current neuroscience on consciousness is closer to how we were dealing with genetics in the 40s: we knew there was genetic material, we were looking for it, we just didn't know exactly what it was (DNA). The problem with consciousness is that it isn't a single thing. It's a process, so until we nail down every individual step of the process, there will always be people saying that the part we don't understand yet is the part that can't be explained by biology.
Have you seen/heard this? https://www.npr.org/2023/08/20/1194905143/how-the-brain-processes-music-with-a-little-help-from-pink-floyd
I think you’ve made some assumptions about my position on this…my sense is that we are essentially in agreement, I’m just a bit more willing to stand in the “we simply don’t know…yet” column?
Yes it deserves study, yes I believe it’s a matter of us not understanding what’s what (and how), not “and then god” or something silly.
I mean no? Where did you get we have any idea how consciousness works at all? We have no idea what structures on the brain have anything to do with it, or if they have anything to do with it at all.
We know about brain structures shaping our personalities, memories and senses. But that’s not consciousness. Not at all.
Perhaps that is the misunderstanding?
Consciousness is awareness, experience. It’s the “observer” under the experience. THAT is a mystery, that is the hardest problem in science. Not “where in the brain do we process sadness?”…
Is your point that memory, emotions, and sensory input don't have anything to do with consciousness?
What exactly is consciousness doing without sensory input to process and memory to give those inputs context?
Why do you think "awareness" of sights and sounds is separate from the parts of the brain that process those sights and sounds?
When you look through a microscope, or hear music through headphones, are you those tools? Or are you the thing that hears and sees?
How can you “have” emotions? When you try to reach the baseline of your experience, when you try to find the thing that experiences reality, what do you think you’ll find?
Grey goo, a network of neurons, a brain. You can literally inject chemicals into your body that change your emotions and consciousness. Physical things can interrupt my consciousness, so why would you assume consciousness is not a physical phenomenon?
When I look through a microscope, photons go through the lens of the microscope, then similarly go through the lens of my eye. My retina absorbs those photons and translates them into action potentials a.k.a. chemical/electrical signals. Those action potentials reach my occipital lobe (going through some synapses as purely chemical signals) where they interact with other action potentials from other parts of my brain, and I have the experience of seeing an image.
If my occipital is not the final destination of these signals, then what is? Where does the information go after it's processed by my brain?
Well, we know that the simple fact of observing an event changes it (see the Double Slit experiment), so consciousness has to have some kind of link to reality itself, no?
We currently do not know what consciousness even is exactly, and we know only about the human consciousness, but there can be other degrees of consciousness within other particles in the universe.
And even if current-day experiments disprove something, that doesn't mean it will in the future, just like before Einstein's laws of relativity proved that gravity bends spacetime and that it is relative according to the point of observation.
And I'm sure people that study neuroscience ask this same question from time to time. It's a scientist's duty to find the factual truth about things, even if they disprove everything they know so far. We can't rule out something as impossible just because we haven't observed it yet, as it would directly contradict the scientific method, and therefore cease to be science.
I think you might be misunderstanding what “observation” means in that context.
Wikipedia: Observer Effect
Thank you for explaining this.
Your opening statement is incorrect. Observation in the quantum mechanics sense does not have anything to do with consciousness. Observation is really just a form of interaction.
Figuring out what's possible versus impossible isn't really part of the scientific method. The scientific method is about collecting and interpreting evidence. Where is the evidence that particles are conscious?
Until there is a testable hypothesis, panpsychism doesn't have anything to do with science.
Others in this thread have already explained that consciousness doesn't play any role in the double slit experiment. I definitely understand your confusion there. I believed the same thing at one point. It doesn't help that some people purposely spread that false interpretation of the experiment because it's more interesting than reality.
It would help if we started explaining that an "observer" in quantum mechanics is another singular quantum particle like an electron or a photon. To "observe" means to collide or entangle.