Emotions and Consciousness Seperate from the Brain ??

And when sleeping?
When given and anesthesia or knocked unconsciousness?
Daydreaming?How does consciousness control brain? Radio waves, or what?lfen

Too late!!!TTFN,WK

It seems you have some difficulty expressing what you mean. You introduce 'probability' here. Why? And what change are you talking about? A probability becoming a reality? Or something becoming more probable, or less probable? It isn't at all clear to me. Suppose the truth is something else than what you believe. Wouldn't you want to know that? Wouldn't you gladly be prepared to destroy a fantasy if it helped you find the truth? And if you find that what you believe is the truth after all, then what harm is done? Where's the harm in being sceptical about what you believe? So they are well on their way to becoming part of our heritage, wouldn't you say? I'm guessing at what "common language" you're talking about, and my guess would be: some kind of inner voice that tells us what it's like to be conscious. I think you imagine that it's more or less the same for all of us, and that we all feel that we control our decisions.Well, what we feel isn't always the way things really are. I sometimes dream that I'm falling. I really feel that I'm falling at that moment, and my heart skips a beat. But the truth is that I'm lying safely in my bed. So I can't always trust my feeling.It might just be that we cannot trust our feeling about free will either. If the doctor hits your knee with his little hammer, do you make a conscious effort to produce the knee-jerk reflex?The brain is a physical object. So, for consciousness to control the brain, it needs to do physical things. And in order to be able to do physical things, it would have to be physical itself. The question then arises: what is the physical nature of consciousness? It's rather easy to say that "consciousness controls the brain", but if you think about it a bit longer, you run into problems.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 12-23-2004 04:36 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

I can say it with other words, but I think change in a probality is the most precise I've come up with so far. I don't understand why you think this is unclear. Yes like you said is what I intended, something becomes more or less probable, a probability becomes realised, all changes in a probability. The name, a name, for that point please. Then we can start discussing constructively about consciousness in a more formalized way.All I'm saying is that we shouldn't throw away our common knowledge about consciousness that we have already. That's what's happening on this forum; well science can't find it, therefore there is nothing in it. It is of course likely that science wouldn't find free will, since the science about decisions, about things going one way or another, is almost non-existent. There is some new bigname scientist, I can't remember his name now, but Brad likes to reference him a lot, who does talk of "inherent randomness", which produces order. That scientist considers his own findings to be revolutionary, the most important since Newton and whatnot. Well maybe that scientist would be acceptable on this forum, but I still think the best way to go about it, is to look at what knowledge is in common language, and try to formalize it a bit, and see if it makes sense or not. And it does make sense in my opinion, our common knowledge seems to be right on the mark.You guess wrong what I consider common knowledge, I'm referring to the way the concept of consciousness is handled in everyday language, and novels, and movies. And I'm not talking about movies, and novels which are selfconsciously about the concept of consciousness, free will etc, but practical usage.I think the solution to control of the physical is nothing. A decision has a position, but does not seem to have any other physical attributes. So I might trace back a decision to a physical object, like a human being, but then it makes no sense to qualify the decision with the height or weight of the object. It is only the place where the decision occurred. Well maybe you can go further then that, and see it was in the brain of the person, and further, it was an electron in the brain. But I think you can go further then that still, and say it came from nothing, then to the electron, and the rest. (some well-known scientists say that the electron=nothing, but I don't understand this argument)I think it is very oppressive, elitist, that common knowledge does not get the respect it deserves. And why? Why revert to almost total ignorance just because science doesn't cover it? Basically you're all just liars, using consciousness in common language as if it is true to fact, but not believing it. You say things that you know not to be true, you are therefore lying continuously. A more friendly way to put it would be to say that the common language used is inconsistent with the stated beliefs, but there is a lot of apparent hatefulness involved here towards religion and common knowledge, so it is more like lying.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Why is it that whatever you personally happen to think is 'common knowledge'? You have yet to provide any evidence that the opinions that you hold are in any way actually widely held. This is especially relevant when you are discussing ridiculously abstruse points.TTFN,WK

Hello,If you are interested, there is some facinating research being done on NDE's. Google search Near Death Experience.

What abtruse point are you talking about?So wait a minute, you are saying that consciousness is not essentially related to decision in mainstream common language, or this must be proven to you?regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Further thoughts:It seems that you are subscribing to physicalism: in this case meaning the brain and the mind are the same thing. If that is true, then the brain and mind would have to have the same properties, and if a property could be established for one that is not true for the other, we would appear to have a duality (ie, the brain and mind could not be the same thing).With that in mind, picture a pink elephant in your mind. Now close your eyes and look at the image. In your mind, you will see a pink property. There is no pink elephant outside of you, but there is a pink image in your mind. However, there is no pink entity in your brain; a neurosurgeon could not open your brain and see a pink entity while you are having the experience of imagining it. The sensory event has a property (pink) that no brain event has. Therefore they (the brain and the mind) cannot be indentical.Also, this sensory perception of a pink elephant has no weight, no chemical content, and no electrical properties, and no true location in space (it is not closer to your left ear than it is your right). Your brain of course has all of these properties. Thus dualism (the reality of the brain being seperate from, although connected to the mind) is established.Thanks for the considerationDennis

That is exactly what I am saying if you claim that a rock bouncing or the outcome of a battle are the result of decision. A person making the decision to choose one particular item from a menu is clearly making a conscious decision, the fact that there are decisions which are not conscious pretty clearly undercuts your argument. That fact that conscious decisions exist does not mean that all decisions have to be conscious. This is the same sort of lazy thinking as when you claimed that because neutral selection could be considered a part of natural selection it meant that neutral selection was all there was to natural selection. Its about the same level of logic as 'All dogs have four legs, my cat has four legs, therefore my cat is a dog.'TTFN,WK

I agree. But you must realize that "try[ing] to formalize it a bit, and see if it makes sense or not" is actually what science does. And the result happens to be that some of our intuitive notions about consciousness and free will - what you call "common knowledge/language" - appear not to be true. If you don't believe this, as I expect you don't, you can check out the literature. (Though even then you will probably not believe it.) This is dualism in it's purest form. It has been refuted ages ago. I don't know why you say this, but it borders on insult. If you want me to continue to talk to you, you must stop calling me a liar. If, on the other hand, you are trying to cut this conversation short, I'd say you're making a fine job of it. It's your choice.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

That is not what I say common knowledge states, you have misconstrued my argument. I say that common knowledge relates consciousness to decision, it's not within common knowledge that every event that goes one way or another demonstrates consciousness of some sort.I've had it again, I'll take off. Conscious without neccesarily any decision going on whatsoever is actually much how I view evolutionists around here. Automatons of the scientific method.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

How true! In fact I am lying right now when I say that this is not true! And this also is a lie. All I do is lie, you have the truth on that, but if I say this is a lie of course I am lying, so it this then the truth? But being a continuous liar of course that is a lie, but then this is a lie that I lie continuously! But I lie, lie, lie.This statement (like every statement I make) is a lie!lfen

I would hesitate to call the mind a thing. I would tentatively say it's an activity. It's a process of sorts that goes on in a functioning brain. Hence, if the brain stops functioning, there is no mind.I think, and I'm just speculating here, that the mind is the result of a very sophisticated system of recursive monitoring. Let me explain what I mean.To let the body function properly in the world, the brain has to monitor all kinds of things: the position of things in the environment, the position of parts of the body relative to other parts, the position of the body itself relative to everything else, the forces exerted on and by the body, the ambient temperature, light coming in, sound coming in, and so on.But, in order to regulate this monitoring, the brain also has to monitor itself while it's monitoring other things. Call it meta-monitoring. And it might also be monitoring itself monitoring itself monitoring other things, meta-meta-monitoring. There may be several layers like that.If monitoring means gathering knowledge about something, then monitoring the monitoring means gathering knowledge about the gathering of knowledge. In other words, the brain knows things, and it also knows that it knows things. But then it also knows that there's an 'it' that does the knowing. This is, simply put, how I think consciousness and the notion of 'self' emerges out of the convoluted heap of monitoring processes.But that's just me. But there is a correlate in the brain. The neurosurgeon could poke around in your brain (while you were locally anaesthetized of course), and you'd possibly report that the elephant changed from pink to yellow. So, clearly there is some connection between certain brain activity and your experiencing the pinkness of the image.The colour pink as such doesn't exist in reality. Objects that appear to be a in particular shade of pink to us, just reflect light of a certain wavelength. That's as close as we can get to an objective description of colours. In essence, the same shade of pink always corresponds to the same wavelength.Representations of the colour pink however, are different in different contexts. In language, it's represented by a word, in the memory of a digital camera it's represented by a group of bytes and in the physical brain it's probably represented by the electrochemical state of a group of nerve cells. And in conscious experience, which is yet another context where the colour pink can be represented, the representation is what it's like to see pink. We may have come to think that what it's like to see pink is the real essence of pink, is pinkness per se, but that would be confusing the representation of a thing with the thing itself. What it's like to see pink is nothing but a way of representing the fact that light of a particular wavelength has reached the retina of our eye, or that other parts of the brain are simulating this (when you remember or imagine seeing pink).Now tell me what you think of this.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 12-24-2004 02:41 AM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Hey ParasomniumThank you for your response in which you say:"If monitoring means gathering knowledge about something, then monitoring the monitoring means gathering knowledge about the gathering of knowledge."This "meta-monitoring" concept is very interesting to me and I would like to hear you speak more about it. However.....Then you say:"The colour pink as such doesn't exist in reality."Here again we have the Darwinian rejecting anything that even has the taste of the supernatural and calling it an argument. But be careful, if the colour pink in this analogy doesn't exist in reality, then neither does the knowledge you speak of the brain gathering.BTW, could you help me figure out these UBB codes.Looking forward to your reply, and MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

You can see how it's done by clicking on the 'raw text' button below each message. If you want more information about how to use UBB codes, there's a link to an overview with examples when you reply to a message. Just look left of the text window where you type your reply, and click on the link "UBB Code is ON". Ask away. How true. Tell me, what colour is your elephant under a streetlight? If colour is nothing but reflected light, then the nature of the light must have consequences for the perceived colour, mustn't it?It gets worse. What colour is the elephant in a pitch dark room? Doesn't the absence of light entail the absence of colour?The conclusion I draw from this gedankenexperiment is that the knowledge that the brain gathers about the elephant is actually not about its colour at all. Instead, it's knowledge about what the elephant looks like in certain lighting conditions. And that knowledge is represented in conscious experience by what it is like to have light of a certain wavelength fall into one's eye. In some circumstances we have an experience we would describe as 'pink', in other circumstances, 'orangish' or 'what elephant?' might be the words of choice.Merry Christmas to you too.

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins