Does the brain really "cause" consciousness?

[Billy T]

I see..So observing is not "looking at". You sound like you have the same special dictionary Sarkus has. Where can I get a copy?

Do you not understand that mixed state wave function interacting with macro state system were collapsing 10 billion years ago? - No life forms or observers of any kind existed then, but macro systems like stars with moons did.

{last part of post 153} ... Cosmic rays hitting a dense nucleus on the surface of the moon a million years ago did briefly produce high energy mixed state wave function that sometimes collapse to create 3 electron/ positon pairs and at other times collapsed into an Eigen state with only 2 elecron/ postron pairs etc. No observations or measurments were made. All that is required to cause the mixed QM state to "collapse" is for it to interact with a macro system. For example, Schrodener´s cat is either dead or alive before you open the box to look. That was his badly misunderstood point.

To think that human observers are required to make the collapse is the same ego-centric POV that also falsely claims the Earth is at the center of the universe.

 

[Billy T]

A late posting duplicate ofpost 161, so am TRYING TO DELETE but can´t get that function to work (get "data base error")

 

[C C]

"The Copenhagen interpretation is one of the earliest and most commonly taught interpretations of quantum mechanics.[1] It holds that quantum mechanics does not yield a description of an objective reality but deals only with probabilities of observing, or measuring, various aspects of energy quanta, entities which fit neither the classical idea of particles nor the classical idea of waves. According to the interpretation, the act of measurement causes the set of probabilities to immediately and randomly assume only one of the possible values. This feature of the mathematics is known as wavefunction collapse. The essential concepts of the interpretation were devised by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others in the years.."--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation1924–27."

Somewhat echoing the philosophical influences of the times. Earlier roots in the 19th century:

Nadeem J. Z. Hussain [quoting Friedrich Albert Lange]: "I take the Hegelian System to be a step backward towards Scholasticism from which we are really already free. Herbart, to whom I first attached myself, was for me only a bridge to Kant, to whom so many honest researchers return in order to, where possible, complete what Kant had only half done: the annihilation of metaphysics”. Lange was thus one of the founding figures in what was to emerge as the neo-Kantian movement rallied by Otto Liebmann's slogan 'Back to Kant!'

But even though the resulting era, well into the 20th century, was one of positivist and lingering neo-Kantian influences -- that dropped Kant's practical philosophy which had "sort of" kept metaphysics alive, Kant still seems to have had an effect upon many back then. (I.E., "...cannot simply speak of *nature in itself*..."; "There is no quantum world ... only abstract quantum physical description..."; "...make no claim to describe physical reality itself..." etc quotes at bottom). But Kant set matters up so that no study of the natural / phenomenal world would encroach up a "noumenal world", as some of those philosophical physicists seemed to mistakenly believe was happening. Ergo their throwing up cautions reminiscent of Kant's, latter in regard to speculative reason overstepping its bounds. The nearest that a fundamental or more primordial condition of nature would even begin to resemble the spaceless, timeless realm of "things in themselves" is in the context of futuristic physics:

Tim Folger: As Rovelli explains it, in quantum mechanics all particles of matter and energy can also be described as waves. And waves have an unusual property: An infinite number of them can exist in the same location. If time and space are one day shown to consist of quanta, the quanta could all exist piled together in a single dimensionless point. 'Space and time in some sense melt in this picture,' says Rovelli. 'There is no space anymore. There are just quanta kind of living on top of one another without being immersed in a space.' [Newsflash: Time May Not Exist Discover Magazine; 2007]

Brian Greene: This is such a perplexing idea that grasping it poses a substantial challenge, even for leading researchers. Broadly speaking, scientists envision that there will be no mention of time and space in the basic equations of the sought-for framework. And yet -- just as clear, liquid water emerges from particular combinations of an enormous number of H20 molecules -- time and space as we know them would emerge from particular combinations of some more basic, though still unidentified, entities. Time and space themselves, though, would be rendered secondary, derivative features, that emerge only in suitable conditions (in the aftermath of the Big Bang, for example). As outrageous as it sounds, to many researchers, including me, such a departure of time and space from the ultimate laws of the universe seems inevitable. [The Time We Thought We Knew NYT; 2003]

- - - - - - - - -

Niels Bohr -- There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. ..... It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. [Spoken at the Como conference, 1927]

Werner Heisenberg -- The atomic physicist has had to resign himself to the fact that his science is but a link in the infinite chain of man's argument with nature, and that it cannot simply speak of *nature in itself*. Science always presupposes the existence of man and, as Bohr has said, we must become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life. [The Physicist's Conception of Nature]

Dmitri N. Shalin -- Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty radically undercut long-standing efforts to read the subject completely out of the picture. For Galileo and Newton, the purpose of scientific investigation was to grasp things in themselves subsisting on their own apart from the knower and his accounting practices. This precept was at the root of what Born called 'the Newtonian style' in physics, which is based on the assumption that 'the external world, the object of natural science, and we, the observing, measuring, calculating subjects, are perfectly separated, that there is a way of obtaining information without interfering with the phenomenon.' Modern microphysics furnished ample proof that the existence of a thing in itself as a meaningful object is inseparable from the process of objectivation. In modern inquiry, 'no radical separation is made between that which is observed and the observer'. Put differently, reality is objective and meaningful insofar as it becomes an object of human activity. [The Pragmatic Origins Of Symbolic Interactionism And The Crisis Of Classical Science]

Jean-Marc Besse -- Until the first half of the twentieth century the idea persisted that physical nature represented an objective reality to be described and explained, a reality located outside of man, which man faced in some way, attempting to adopt a scientific and objective view of it. Discoveries and theories of quantum physics have seriously challenged this belief. In a famous text, Heisenberg came to the general conclusion that can be drawn from one of the main aspects of quantum mechanics, which has led to a questioning of the habitual realism of classical physics: when we apply a measuring device to a quantum system, when, more precisely, we aim to measure the behaviour of a particle by means of a device, an interaction takes place, i.e., a transfer of energy between the measuring device and the measured quantum system, and hence an irreversible and unpredictable modification of the behaviour of the particle. For example, it is impossible to determine at the same time the location of a particle in space-time and its energy quantum. This perturbation of the measured object by the measuring device is generally neglected in the description of macroscopic phenomena (those related to everyday life). But it cannot be neglected at the microscopic level: this means that the definition of the natural phenomenon depends strictly on the initial conditions as well as on the measurement theory in use. The consequence that Heisenberg deducts from this is firm: what physicists apprehend when they work at the microscopic level, the knowledge they obtain, is not the natural phenomenon in itself as independent from the observer, but an effect of the interaction between man's technical and cognitive act and a reality that cannot be reached directly. At the microscopic level, the physical, or natural object cannot be concretely described. It is just a mental scheme. ..... In conclusion: nature always pre-supposes culture, which is the framework for its analysis and interpretation. [Nature and culture]

 

[wellwisher]

We do not yet have a consensus definition for consciousness. At the same time, consciousness is one of the most important tools needed to investigate consciousness, which is not yet defined.

It is like using a machine to investigate the machine while not being able to agree what the machine is or does. This is why we get the lament of philosophers, scientists and journalists, who can't agree because, since each think the machine is different, and each loops back to their own expectations, created by their own consciousness.

 

[river]

Well what of the dmt molecule , which is found in the center of the brain , pineal body and nobody knows why it is even there

And this molecule is found in all living things , even plants

 

[Magical Realist]

CC, welcome back! That's more in line with what I personally have learned about quantum theory. While not claiming to understand how it works, I knew that it had basically collapsed the classical physicalist version of nature into something more in line with a neo-kantian noumenalism. No doubt the physicalists perservere in spinning it all into some easily reducible classical phenomenon. But the math continues to defy them, especially with the increasing experimental support for the non-physicalist phenomenon of quantum entanglement and nonlocality. I suppose the issue remains as to how a mere measuring device can collapse a wavefunction. Is a measuring device an extention of conscious observation? Perhaps so. To me it raises even more questions about what this mysterious property of mind is and just how deeply it is interwoven into the physical world.

 

[Magical Realist]

"The universe and the observer exist as a pair," Linde says. "You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say,Yes, I see the universe there. These small words— it looks like it was here—for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers. We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers,I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device? In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need tohave us. It's not enough for the information to be stored somewhere,completely inaccessible to anybody. It's necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead."

This whole article is a good summary of John Wheeler's view on quantum theory and consciousness.

http://www.discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse

 

[Magical Realist]

We do not yet have a consensus definition for consciousness. At the same time, consciousness is one of the most important tools needed to investigate consciousness, which is not yet defined.

It is like using a machine to investigate the machine while not being able to agree what the machine is or does. This is why we get the lament of philosophers, scientists and journalists, who can't agree because, since each think the machine is different, and each loops back to their own expectations, created by their own consciousness.

I have a tentative though perhaps radical definition of consciousness. It is the experience of an object or event as a real object or event. In this case consciousness presupposes a reality to be conscious of. But reality at the same time presupposes a consciousness to which it can occur AS REAL. This unfortunately leaves us in the quandary of the dualist, which to many is an unsatifying solution to the problem.

 

[C C]

I suppose the issue remains as to how a mere measuring device can collapse a wavefunction. Is a measuring device an extention of conscious observation? Perhaps so. To me it raises even more questions about what this mysterious property of mind is and just how deeply it is interwoven into the physical world.

In place of the traditional collapse, Wojciech Zurek's approach appeals to decoherence, as did Everett's, but remaining agnostic about whether or not that leads to a situation of "many worlds". As the bottom quote suggests, Zurek's quantum darwinism might even be a compromise between the old and the new, in that it is not minus some interpretational tweaking. Again, it all seems to be a matter of whether or not there is either a desire or a need to infer / explain anything beyond the experimental results conforming to scheme or descriptive expectations (and if so, just personal or team philosophical preference as to the choice of bugbears).

Quantum Darwinism: "Decoherence does not generate actual wave function collapse. It only provides an explanation for the appearance of the wavefunction collapse, as the quantum nature of the system 'leaks' into the environment."

"The discontinuous 'wave function collapse' postulated in the Copenhagen interpretation to enable the theory to be related to the results of laboratory measurements now can be understood as an aspect of the normal dynamics of quantum mechanics via the decoherence process. Consequently, decoherence is an important part of the modern alternative to the Copenhagen interpretation [...] However, decoherence by itself may not give a complete solution of the measurement problem, since all components of the wave function still exist in a global superposition, which is explicitly acknowledged in the many-worlds interpretation. All decoherence explains, in this view, is why these coherences are no longer available for inspection by local observers. To present a solution to the measurement problem in most interpretations of quantum mechanics, decoherence must be supplied with some nontrivial interpretational considerations (as for example Wojciech Zurek tends to do in his Existential interpretation). However, according to Everett and DeWitt the many-worlds interpretation can be derived from the formalism alone, in which case no extra interpretational layer is required."

Guido Bacciagaluppi (from The Role of Decoherence in Quantum Mechanics; SEP): "It appears that Bohr held more or less the following view. Everyday concepts, in fact the concepts of classical physics, are indispensable to the description of any physical phenomena (in a way — and terminology — much reminiscent of Kant's transcendental arguments). However, experimental evidence from atomic phenomena shows that classical concepts have fundamental limitations in their applicability: they can only give partial (complementary) pictures of physical objects. While these limitations are quantitatively negligible for most purposes in dealing with macroscopic objects, they apply also at that level (as shown by Bohr's willingness to apply the uncertainty relations to parts of the experimental apparatus in the Einstein-Bohr debates), and they are of paramount importance when dealing with microscopic objects. Indeed, they shape the characteristic features of quantum phenomena, e.g., indeterminism. The quantum state is not an ‘intuitive’ (anschaulich, also translated as ‘visualisable’) representation of a quantum object, but only a ‘symbolic’ representation, a shorthand for the quantum phenomena constituted by applying the various complementary classical pictures.

"While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what Bohr's views were (the concept and even the term ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ appear to be a later construct; see Howard 2003), it is clear that according to Bohr, classical concepts are autonomous from, and indeed conceptually prior to, quantum theory. If we understand the theory of decoherence as pointing to how classical concepts might in fact emerge from quantum mechanics, this seems to undermine Bohr's basic position. Of course it would be a mistake to say that decoherence (a part of quantum theory) contradicts the Copenhagen approach (an interpretation of quantum theory). However, decoherence does suggest that one might want to adopt alternative interpretations, in which it is the quantum concepts that are prior to the classical ones, or, more precisely, the classical concepts at the everyday level emerge from quantum mechanics (irrespectively of whether there are even more fundamental concepts, as in pilot-wave theories). In this sense, if the programme of decoherence is successful as sketched in Section 3.3, it will indeed be a blow to Bohr's interpretation coming from quantum physics itself.

"On the other hand, Bohr's intuition that quantum mechanics as practised requires a classical domain would in fact be confirmed by decoherence, if it turns out that decoherence is indeed the basis for the phenomenology of quantum mechanics, as the Everettian and possibly the Bohmian analysis suggest. As a matter of fact, Zurek (2003) locates his existential interpretation half-way between Bohr and Everett. It is perhaps a gentle irony that in the wake of decoherence, the foundations of quantum mechanics might end up re-evaluating this part of Bohr's thinking."

 

[hansda]

Evidence is there, where 'consciousness interacts with mass'.



Note:Here my definition of consciousness is as defined in my post #39 in this thread. Definition of mass is as defined in Physics.

 

[hansda]

We do not yet have a consensus definition for consciousness.

I think you are right. There is no uniform definition for the term consciousness. Even wiki also does not have a very clear definition for this term. In spiritualism "consciousness" is considered as our real/true self. Whereas in Psychology "consciousness" is considered as a state of awareness of our mind/brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness .

At the same time, consciousness is one of the most important tools needed to investigate consciousness, which is not yet defined.

Consciousness is needed to investigate anything and everything including consciousness itself.

 

[hansda]

I have a tentative though perhaps radical definition of consciousness. It is the experience of an object or event as a real object or event. In this case consciousness presupposes a reality to be conscious of. But reality at the same time presupposes a consciousness to which it can occur AS REAL. This unfortunately leaves us in the quandary of the dualist, which to many is an unsatifying solution to the problem.

Consciousness can be considered as "some existence" with which we become conscious/aware of all the things in existence.

 

[Yazata]

Do you not understand that mixed state wave function interacting with macro state system were collapsing 10 billion years ago? - No life forms or observers of any kind existed then, but macro systems like stars with moons did.

That's a problem for the quantum idealists and for idealism generally. What are we to make of all of the countless regions of the universe where no sentient observer is present?

Should we say that those places simply don't exist? Personally, I'm much more inclined to say that space-probes discover the topography on Mars, as opposed to initially creating it by allowing sentient humans to observe it for the first time. (Remotely, how does that work?) Somehow our human observation creates a Martian scene complete with supposed "evidence" of physical conditions that we falsely assume prevailed millions of years ago. (Reminds me of young-earth creationism, except that we've replaced God with ourselves in the role of creator.)

(George Berkeley got around that objection by insisting that omniscient God is omnipresent, but I suspect that our violently anti-Christian Magical Realist isn't going to want to use that strategy. It would also raise the question of how uncollapsed superimposed states could exist on any level, even the microscale. Is God slacking off and not observing what's happening down there?)

To think that human observers are required to make the collapse is the same ego-centric POV that also falsely claims the Earth is at the center of the universe.

Right. I emphatically agree with that.

 

[ElectricFetus]

If we ever create sentient AI or uploaded human simulents, we then likely be able to finally answer these questions of what is and causes consciousness, until then this is all endless debate.

 

[Yazata]

Niels Bohr -- There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. ..... It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. [Spoken at the Como conference, 1927]

"There is no quantum world" Presumably something is happening down there on the microscale.

Bohr seems to be sliding towards an instrumentalist account of QM there, the idea that the mathematical apparatus of QM isn't intended to tell us anything about what (if anything) is happening down on the microscale, but rather is simply intended to predict what the results of our classical macro-scale experiments will be.

That's a defensible position I guess, and some philosophers (like Van Fraassen) continue to defend it.

The thing is, science typically does want to tell us how the universe is, how it behaves, even when scientists aren't actively preforming experiments on it. Geologists assume that volcanoes exist even when geologists aren't actively observing and measuring them. Astrophysics assumes that galaxies physically exist out there, and aren't just names given to coherent clusters of human astronomical observations.

There is only an abstract quantum physical description.

So why call it a "physical description"? That phrase seems to suggest some kind of implicit ontological commitment, the idea that there's something beyond the "description" itself that's being described. Why not call what physics is doing a "calculation" instead, a calculation that's merely intended to predict what the results of experiments will be? Why suggest that physics is about anything besides that?

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is.

That's been the intention, purpose and goal of science for as long as there's been science. It's what the vast majority of molecular geneticists, astrophysicists and oceanographers out there think that they're doing every day. Is quantum physics fundamentally different than all of the rest of the sciences? Or does Bohr think that all of the sciences need to be reconceived in a non-realist and purely instrumentalist manner?

Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

Anybody can say anything they like about nature. Poets do it all of the time. So do psychotics.

Presumably something more is needed, some plausible account of truth. There's also the problem of accounting for scientific explanations, which often make use of the causal powers supposedly possessed by the entities that science purports to describe. That suggests another kind of ontological commitment sneaking in.

 

[Yazata]

That's more in line with what I personally have learned about quantum theory. While not claiming to understand how it works, I knew that it had basically collapsed the classical physicalist version of nature into something more in line with a neo-kantian noumenalism.

I think that it's more an example of "garbage in, garbage out".

The early 20'th century quantum physicists were often Germans, or people educated in the German manner (like Bohr). When they encountered seriously counterintuitive experimental results, some of them looked to philosophy for resources in making sense of it. And German philosophy in those years was strongly influenced by Neokantianism. So these physicists imported Kantian presuppositions into their speculations about what their physics might mean. And then the later quantum idealists have pulled those Kantian presuppositions out once again with a flourish, insisting that physics somehow verifies a Kantian-style metaphysical idealism.

I don't think that it does. My own view is that Kant's philosophy probably isn't a whole lot of help in making sense of quantum mechanics. Right now, it isn't really clear what the best philosophical interpretation of QM might turn out to be. It's still very much a work in progress. (That's what makes it so interesting.)

No doubt the physicalists perservere in spinning it all into some easily reducible classical phenomenon.

Why would a physicalist have to spin it "into some easily reducible classical phenomenon"? You seem to be trying to create a dichotomy between 1) classical physics, and 2) a metaphysical idealism. The thing is, those aren't the only two options.

Physicalism is a work-in-progress, and physicalists might very well discover that reality at its most basic "machine-language" level is very unlike classical physics. Quantum mechanics, interpreted in a non-instrumentalist and more realist manner, suggests that might indeed be the case.

But that doesn't imply that the whole universe is simply created in the sensory manifold of some kind of metaphysically transcendent, essentially spiritual and certainly non-physical mind. (That delivers us back to something very close to faith in God.)

But the math continues to defy them, especially with the increasing experimental support for the non-physicalist phenomenon of quantum entanglement and nonlocality.

Why do you refer to those observations as "non-physicalist"? They might not be classical, but how do we leap from non-classical to non-physical (and hence presumably spiritual)? That's an idealist move that needs to be justified and defended.

I suppose the issue remains as to how a mere measuring device can collapse a wavefunction. Is a measuring device an extention of conscious observation? Perhaps so. To me it raises even more questions about what this mysterious property of mind is and just how deeply it is interwoven into the physical world.

Why can't physical interactions collapse wavefunctions, as BillyT suggested up above? I think that's how most contemporary physicists envision it. Why should we leap to the conviction that it's minds (interpreted in a spiritualist and non-scientific manner) that have to be what's doing it?

 

[Magical Realist]

Yazata, you create a false dichotomy between physical and spiritual, as if anything non-physical has to be spiritual in nature. That's not true at all. Non-physical can refer to lots of other domains. The mental as in consciousness. The mathematical and geometric as in neo-platonism. The virtual, as in virtual realities and virtual particles. And imo the statistical, as in probablistic agents of causation such as attractors, basins of attraction, and Bohm's pilot waves. Mystical experiences also seem to be included in the realm of the non-physical. Finally, and you may laugh at this point, but I also happen to take evidence for some paranormal phenomenon seriously. There is a plethora of evidence for ghosts as well as for psychical mental abilities such as telepathy and clairavoyance. Typically this gets dismissed here as irrational "woowooism", but I simply remain open minded to the evidence that is growing in this field. So no, I am not looking for a God behind physical reality. I am simply acknowledging the obvious fact that reality includes more than just the domain of the physical.

 

[Aqueous Id]

Does the brain really "cause" consciousness?

That's an odd way to put it. Does a falling domino cause another to topple? Or is it gravity, inertia, momentum, mass, force, velocity and/or energy? A lawyer might call these proximate causes within a causal nexus. In fact, this question may address causality more than anything else.

On the other hand, I'm quite certain that the causal nexus for the propagation of a single pulse down a cerebral axon parallels that of falling dominoes, insofar as the random collisions of charged molecules onto the gated channels along the axon membrane will produce the movement through space of an electric potential:

--so the physical structures that carry out the functions of sense, motor control and sentience can be described in terms of causation. But I'm not sure the term "cause" applies to the word "consciousness". In the first place, we don't actually know what consciousness is, although we are quite certain of what it's not. It's not material. It's unclear what "cause" means outside of the material world of falling dominoes, even after we get past the best estimation of what constitutes the causal nexus for a given brain activity.

Many scientists certainly assume it does.

I'm not sure about that. I think a neurologist will tell you that you that the brain stem and cerebral cortex are "the seat" of consciousness, which is a little different than "the cause". Furthermore, since certain self-initiated activity will produce a flow of action potentials, it's equally plausible to say that consciousness causes brain activity. I'm just not sure "cause" is the right word.

Afterall, for every self-reported conscious experience there appears to exist a corresponding firing of neural synapses.

Something like that. (Or you could say the discharge of neurotransmitter across a synaptic junction.) Obviously that's an elemental view. Add to this what seems to be a rat's nest of combinatorial and sequential logic, replete with all of the routing of unfathomably numerous afferent and efferent pathways, plus the multitude of sensory and motor terminals--plus the interfaces with the chemical valves and factories of the endocrine system--and the focus on synapse seems rather narrow. Of course there is no known way to organize these and associate them with thoughts, dreams or any other activity of the brain.

But does that really establish causation?

I would say there is a causal nexus, but only with respect to tangibles like action potentials and hormone secretion.

Similarly we may assume that since every fire is accompanied by the burning of a material, that the burning of the material is causing the flame. Yet we also allow for the flame's causation of the burning of material. Is not the flame burning the log? Does not a flame in fact ignite the whole process?

That better describes a chain reaction involving conservation of energy (and momentum), provided you consider it through the lens of basic physics.

So this notion of a one-way bottom up causation of consciousness appears abit simplistic upon analysis.

Especially when you look at it this way.

Do we really attribute our thoughts and decisions to the mere sporadic firestorm crackling inside our brains? No.

I don't think we know what to say about it, other than patterns seen, such as on PET scans.

On a daily basis we freely attribute to ourselves an equally causal role on the course of our own mental processes.

Not sure what you mean. And who's this "we"? A Buddhist monk in meditation, a drooling patient in a psych ward, someone medicated or otherwise gone, a person who is daydreaming or asleep, and a person who is experiencing trauma or joy or some other intense sense of the themselves and of the world, may not describe it at all like this.

We assume we have moral responsibility for our actions, and take credit for the choices and reasonings that our mind generates.

A sense of moral values arises from a combination of acculturation and empathy. Things like rules are all artifacts of culture.

So what gives? What is really causing what?

No one knows.

Perhaps our error here is that we fail to see that consciousness and brain processes are really just two manifestations of a third process.

Sounds non sequitur.

Perhaps as with the flame and its material, we trap ourselves into a game of reciprocal causation simply because we do not see that there is another underlying agency besides the mental and the physical that is generating them both.

Or perhaps not.

This position is known as neutral monism.

I suppose it's that plus more.

That since consciousness and brain processes ARE ontically the same, they are not in fact causing each other but rather are unfolding out of an as yet unknown deeper order that we have yet to discover.

Or not. For one thing I wouldn't characterize consciousness as "ontic". But especially: the likelihood of ever understanding consciousness is probably nil.

Just as the flame and the burning of the material are really just two manifestations of one underlying thermal reaction.

I doubt it.

 

[Billy T]

... I think a neurologist will tell you that you that the brain stem and cerebral cortex are "the seat" of consciousness, which is a little different than "the cause".

The seat of consciousness in not in the brain stem, but activity in that tiny part of the brain stem (in the core) called the "reticular formation" is essential for you to be conscious (or even awake / not in deep sleep). Unfortunately a part of the thalamus is also called the "reticular formation," so if you want to read more about it search with "Brain stem reticular formation."

The brainstem reticular formation is a region within the brainstem core with a complex highly structured pattern of overlapping dendritic fields in the transverse (coronal) plane which arise from several distinct nuclei embedded within the network.In 1949 the concept of the general function of the reticular formation changed overnight with the publication of a pair of papers (Lindsley et al. … 1949; Morruzzi and Magoun proposed that there is a diffuse system of ascending fibers arising in the reticular formation that is responsible for control of states of consciousness. They called their system the ascending reticular activating system (the ARAS).
Please Note: The ARAS is a functional concept. The reticular formation is an anatomical structure.

I define consciousness as the brain state in which the parietal lobes are running (or executing) the Real Time Simulation, RTS. If you want to read the "essay" (Last part of a paper I published in 1994) on the RTS & free will go here:
http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?2868-About-determinism&p=882356&viewfull=1#post882356

Although not a very good analogy, the role of the "reticular formation" in consciousness is much like the role of the clock in a digital computer.

I also note again that consciousness is not an all or nothing thing. The most startling demonstration of this occurs in the disease called “unilateral neglect” where a stroke has occurred in a parietal lobe. If stroke is large and damages most of the (for example) right lobe, then the patient lives in only the right half of the world. In my model, there is no simulation of the left part of the world – it simple is not perceivable or does not exist for that patient. Even if quite hungry only the food on the right side of the plate will be eaten etc. I ran some perception tests on a nice old lady with extreme (total neglect) of one side. Her stroke was many year earlier and she was no longer bothered by voices that came from speaker in the side of the world that did not exist.

Briefly: She fixated on flashing spot in center of computer screen and when a tone sounded for about a second either a red or green spot would appear either to the right or left of the central fixation spot by about 8 degrees from it and she was to tell which color was briefly displayed. Colored spots in her “preserved” perceptual half were correctly named >85% of the time. When spot was displayed in her not preserved side, she complained that there was no spot shown with the tone, but she liked the attention a young graduate student was giving her so after about a half an hour I had her guessing the color of the spot that should be shown with the tone. She was correct in her guess more than 75% after discarding the first half hour – I.e. when she played this silly game to please me with no more complaints that it was silly to tell the color of a spot she could not see, - did not even exist. Point of these tests were to provide proof that there was no significant defect in her visual system or its ability to call forth from her lexicon the correct color names without any need of consciousness of half the real world the spot did appear in.

Even one´s body image can be destroyed by parietal strokes. Sometimes the victim of one, still in the hospital bed when he shifts the direction of his gaze to see his leg in his preserved visual field (but no longer has that leg tactically existing for him). Will call the nurse and angrily complain that they have left someone´s leg in his bed. I.e. not only does half the external world no longer exist neither does half of your body. If asked to put the hour numbers in a round circle 1 thru 12 will all be on one side (to you) of the circle only. There is a wonderful set of self-portraits by skill artist at about 1 month intervals showing half a face in the first, but as he learned more about what had happened to him, he does shift his gaze and draws a shrunken half for that part of his face he can not experience anymore. Perhaps someone skilled in searching will find them and post the series.

In addition to only unilateral spatial neglect when the parietal stroke is smaller, there are altered states of consciousness, some by drugs and others just by aging and associated confusion.

A few words on your nice illustration of the ionic flows within an axon with traveling action potential:
You units are mV and I believe that the more typical resting potential is -70mV (but my data it 25+ years old). Also there is no indication of the “Sodium pump” but it is not part of the neural pulse dynamics illustrated, but should at least be mentioned. The illustration only shows “the inrush of Na+ ion” to drive the nerve (axon) interior positive. Also I don´t believe the over shoot gets to be the +30 mV shown – only about +10mv at most. This rapid flood of Na+ ions must be pumped back out to the exterior of axon sheath to restore the negative resting potential.

 

[C C]

The early 20'th century quantum physicists were often Germans, or people educated in the German manner (like Bohr). When they encountered seriously counterintuitive experimental results, some of them looked to philosophy for resources in making sense of it. And German philosophy in those years was strongly influenced by Neokantianism. So these physicists imported Kantian presuppositions into their speculations about what their physics might mean. And then the later quantum idealists have pulled those Kantian presuppositions out once again with a flourish, insisting that physics somehow verifies a Kantian-style metaphysical idealism. I don't think that it does. My own view is that Kant's philosophy probably isn't a whole lot of help in making sense of quantum mechanics.

They were mistaken, or never quite grasped that "nature" had conditions for making it possible in Kant's philosophy (it didn't turn into "noumenal" at any level or substrate). Anything still grounded in space / time was part of Kant's "phenomenal world", and thus a "realist" or non-descriptive stance about QM (as it stands) should have had nothing to do with infringing upon things in themselves, the unconditioned, etc. Kant submitted no limits to what was yet to be discovered in the empirical connections of phenomena from top to bottom, or from present to past. Because there was such dependency upon inferences of experimental results and formal description, one might consider the anti-metaphysical positivists of that era to have also been frightened by a vague resemblance of physics constructs to the intelligible entities of the Greeks ("understood" rather than "seen" directly; or the appearance of granting causal powers to generalizations rather than discrete objects sometimes).

Still, references like "nature in itself" springing from these positivist and neo-Kantian influences doesn't seem to make much sense if they didn't find a perception / conception independent counterpart to the experienced / tested environment as logically warranted as Kant did, rather than their being denialists of such, as is often depicted. Indeed, the use of "interaction" below would make no sense -- this corrupt product arising from relation or interference of observer (cognitive system) with what would otherwise then be nothing (that is, not simply an unknowable in terms of experience, or as existing independent of the latter). For some odd reason they just mistakenly thought that the microscopic stratum of "nature" would be entering Kant's transcendent territory -- beyond space / time intuitions and the conceptions of thought -- if entities in that area of investigation were taken to be more than useful description (or as "real" as the everyday objects of Kant's empirical realism).

Dmitri N. Shalin -- Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty radically undercut long-standing efforts to read the subject completely out of the picture. For Galileo and Newton, the purpose of scientific investigation was to grasp things in themselves subsisting on their own apart from the knower and his accounting practices. This precept was at the root of what Born called 'the Newtonian style' in physics, which is based on the assumption that 'the external world, the object of natural science, and we, the observing, measuring, calculating subjects, are perfectly separated, that there is a way of obtaining information without interfering with the phenomenon.' Modern microphysics furnished ample proof that the existence of a thing in itself as a meaningful object is inseparable from the process of objectivation. In modern inquiry, 'no radical separation is made between that which is observed and the observer'. Put differently, reality is objective and meaningful insofar as it becomes an object of human activity. [The Pragmatic Origins Of Symbolic Interactionism And The Crisis Of Classical Science]

Jean-Marc Besse: The consequence that Heisenberg deducts from this is firm: what physicists apprehend when they work at the microscopic level, the knowledge they obtain, is not the natural phenomenon in itself as independent from the observer, but an effect of the interaction between man's technical and cognitive act and a reality that cannot be reached directly. At the microscopic level, the physical, or natural object cannot be concretely described. It is just a mental scheme. In conclusion: nature always pre-supposes culture, which is the framework for its analysis and interpretation. [Nature and culture]