Does the brain really "cause" consciousness?

Billy, you claim a soul, by which I take it you mean a non-physical agent, cannot move matter. Yet many would classify the soul as simply the mind of a person. How can you deny that your own mind moves your body when it decides too? You have a thought--your fingers move accordingly over the keyboard to type it out--and bam! matter has moved in response to your mere thought. Are we back to squabbling over the timings of pre-occurrent neural firings?
 
Magical Realist said:
Billy, you claim a soul, by which I take it you mean a non-physical agent, cannot move matter. Yet many would classify the soul as simply the mind of a person. How can you deny that your own mind moves your body when it decides too? You have a thought--your fingers move accordingly over the keyboard to type it out--and bam! matter has moved in response to your mere thought. Are we back to squabbling over the timings of pre-occurrent neural firings?
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The brain is physical. Not sure why you would think otherwise.
 
spidergoat said:
The mind is an illusion, but it's a side effect of a physical brain, which is behind every decision.
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Maybe YOUR mind's an illusion. Mine sure isn't..And no, it's not a side effect of undirected synaptic sputtering. With my own mind I can initiate real actions and thoughts and decisions that cause changes in my own brain processes. You do this too. That's why I'm talking to a real rational person instead of to a sporadically-firing brain.
 
Magical Realist said:
Maybe YOUR mind's an illusion. Mine sure isn't..And no, it's not a side effect of undirected synaptic sputtering.
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Who says it's undirected?
With my own mind I can initiate real actions and thoughts and decisions that cause changes in my own brain processes.
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You can? Or are "you" (i.e. the conscious part of your brain) merely a perspective of the workings of your brain?
You put your consciousness at the apex of activity within your brain, but that might be no better an assessment than the early claim that the Earth was the centre of the solar-system.
You also seem to offer a false dichotomy - that the alternative to your view is chaotic, unguided activity.
 
Magical Realist said:
Maybe YOUR mind's an illusion. Mine sure isn't..And no, it's not a side effect of undirected synaptic sputtering. With my own mind I can initiate real actions and thoughts and decisions that cause changes in my own brain processes. You do this too. That's why I'm talking to a real rational person instead of to a sporadically-firing brain.
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I know it's an illusion because it's possible to step back and observe your conscious mental process with another conscious mental process, it's just not possible to observe them all, since you need at least one to do the observing. Also there are the right and left halves which can have some independence, especially in certain medical cases where the communication between them has been cut. Multiple personality disorders also make the illusion rather obvious.
 
Sarkus said:
Who says it's undirected?
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Who or what is doing the directing then? Are you seriously ascribing chains of electrochemical reactions with telic intent?



You can? Or are "you" (i.e. the conscious part of your brain) merely a perspective of the workings of your brain?
You put your consciousness at the apex of activity within your brain, but that might be no better an assessment than the early claim that the Earth was the centre of the solar-system.
You also seem to offer a false dichotomy - that the alternative to your view is chaotic, unguided activity.
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Yes I can. Duh..I'm doing it right now. And if they hooked up cat scan to my brain they'd be able to record the brain activity responding to what I decide to think. IOW, we do indeed cause our actions. It's simply ridiculous to claim otherwise.
 
spidergoat said:
I know it's an illusion because it's possible to step back and observe your conscious mental process with another conscious mental process, it's just not possible to observe them all, since you need at least one to do the observing. Also there are the right and left halves which can have some independence, especially in certain medical cases where the communication between them has been cut. Multiple personality disorders also make the illusion rather obvious.
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If you can step back and observe a mental process, then you certainly aren't part of that mental process anymore. Who or what is this entity that has the power to step back and acquire the autonomy to observe its own mental processes?
 
Magical Realist said:
Who or what is doing the directing then? Are you seriously ascribing chains of electrochemical reactions with telic intent?
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Duh! The thing you are calling you is made of the entire collection of cells, reactions, states of charge and potential contained in your skin.
 
spidergoat said:
Duh! The thing you are calling you is made of the entire collection of cells, reactions, states of charge and potential contained in your skin.
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Really..I thought I was the being that could always step back from those reactions and observe them going on separate from me. The conscious self that in fact does NOT experience itself as just synaptic firings but as a thinking feeling mind who can change and influence those firings.
 
Magical Realist said:
Really..I thought I was the being that could always step back from those reactions and observe them going on separate from me. The conscious self that in fact does NOT experience itself as just synaptic firings but as a thinking feeling mind who can change and influence those firings.
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I misspoke. The thing we generally call "I" is the self illusion. The real self is the physical body that generates the illusion. But since that physical body has no real border between it and everything else that exists, our real self is in fact the universe itself and so can be considered immortal.
 
spidergoat said:
I misspoke. The thing we generally call "I" is the self illusion. The real self is the physical body that generates the illusion. But since that physical body has no real border between it and everything else that exists, our real self is in fact the universe itself and so can be considered immortal.
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How pantheistic of you. So when you say "I misspoke" must I assume it was the illusion of you that misspoke? Or was it really all the cells in your body and all the air molecules you are breathing and the entire universe that misspoke? Personally I take the existence of my conscious self to be one of the fundamental self-evident facts of my experience. Much as I take my consciousness of my body and world to be fundamental given facts as well. Why should your consciousness get it so wrong about being a conscious self while totally nailing it on the body and the world? Is all self-consciousness an illusion?
 
Magical Realist said:
How pantheistic of you. So when you say "I misspoke" must I assume it was the illusion of you that misspoke? Or was it really all the cells in your body and all the air molecules you are breathing and the entire universe that misspoke? Personally I take the existence of my conscious self to be one of the fundamental self-evident facts of my experience. Much as I take my consciousness of my body and world to be fundamental given facts as well. Why should your consciousness get it so wrong about being a conscious self while totally nailing it on the body and the world? Is all self-consciousness an illusion?
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We need the illusion of a persistent coherent self in order to know, at the most basic level, which hole to put the food in. Most of us also think everything we perceive is real, even though if we look at an example like sight; the light detecting cells have a limited density, that information undergoes a filtering process and is sent to the brain where it must be interpreted into separate objects, colors, and all the rest. It's so many steps removed from a complete picture of reality, even compared to other animals, but we take it for granted that what we see is real. The brain is similar to a movie film running at 24 frames per second which we link together as a persistent image. There are separate thoughts, but a stream of thoughts makes us think there is something persistent which is a thinking being.
 
spidergoat said:
We need the illusion of a persistent coherent self in order to know, at the most basic level, which hole to put the food in.
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So most, if not all, animal life is necessarily self-aware? That is not evinced.
 
Billy T said:
NO !!! I never did that. In fact I don´t even know what actually exists that could even be called a soul.
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I do. That part of our psychology that transcends earth. Faith, Wish, Science. They exist in nature, so can that which we produce of our mind go to a grand source of any one of them?

Giving us eternal life in scientific terms.

Does my mind produce beyond any here say evidence to heavenly existence? Faith.

Who ever challenges perception, or conscious is a jack fool. On the grand scale we perceive as one, no matter how many drugs you take. Perception is fun to lie about, others.
 
spidergoat said:
We need the illusion of a persistent coherent self in order to know, at the most basic level, which hole to put the food in. Most of us also think everything we perceive is real, even though if we look at an example like sight; the light detecting cells have a limited density, that information undergoes a filtering process and is sent to the brain where it must be interpreted into separate objects, colors, and all the rest. It's so many steps removed from a complete picture of reality, even compared to other animals, but we take it for granted that what we see is real. The brain is similar to a movie film running at 24 frames per second which we link together as a persistent image. There are separate thoughts, but a stream of thoughts makes us think there is something persistent which is a thinking being.
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To be a witness to a stream of thoughts entails the existence of a conscious witness. Without this persistant pov thoughts would occur as new and totally unrelated to each other. We'd be in a state of extreme schizophrenia incapable of controlling our thoughts or even separating them from reality. The fact that we CAN do this means we are not just illusions but actual thinkers who exert real control over the course of our thoughts and who can even decide when to take action on them. There are iow no thoughts without a thinker..at least no rational ones we could ever make any sense out of.
 
Magical Realist said:
To be a witness to a stream of thoughts entails the existence of a conscious witness. Without this persistant pov thoughts would occur as new and totally unrelated to each other. We'd be in a state of extreme schizophrenia incapable of controlling our thoughts or even separating them from reality. The fact that we CAN do this means we are not just illusions but actual thinkers who exert real control over the course of our thoughts and who can even decide when to take action on them. There are iow no thoughts without a thinker..at least no rational ones we could ever make any sense out of.
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The perception of witnessing thoughts arise is also a thought, one which cannot perceive it's own origin. The origin must then be more basic than thought, some kind of physical process of computation. The process gives rise to the feeling of control, but I don't think it is actual control. I think it's a hierarchy of filters or post-processing of spontaneous connections of meaning or stream of consciousness. This stream is something you can perceive when all the filters are removed by something like LSD. In all this process of data manipulation, what can we point to that aligns with the concept of a coherent, persistent self?
 
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