Consciousness

First off, just want to reiterate, am considering it good fortune to have discovered this group. In a weird way, shows there's hope for humanity.

In anycase, a question.

How do you define "consciousness?"

Not looking for Merriam-Webster definition here. Have studied the mind and it's functions, on many levels, for many years. Even within the neurobiology community, there's much debate.

Is it physical or non-physical? Simply synaptic nerve endings firing off? Something you think we don't have the knowledge or technology to truly define yet?

All views accepted and respected.

Thanks!

I do not think we can completely define consciousness in the conventional sense as we only have a general understanding of what it is.  You can explain how the nerves fire or how the chemical balance is maintained, but that only will partially explain consciousness.

How do you define instinct?  How about memories?  Can you take a piece a brain out and identify that this was the memory of playing baseball with your dad?  I mean you can identify the effects afterwards, but we still cannot truly know what each individual memory is.

Plus, what about psychic abilities?  How would you explain those abilities?  The easy way is to say that there is no such thing and everyone is making it up.  A similar explanation is given for dreams.  Dreams are not influence on everyday life, do not have meaning, and are the manifest of our mind's information sorting.  Does this really explain without a doubt that dreams and psychic abilities have no physical basis?  My dreams have never reflected on what happened during the day.  Rather they have always been about traveling, walking somewhere.

I think we have barely scratched the surface with consciousness.  We do not have the means today to define what it is. 

I am a dualist. I think consciousness may be do in part to material aspects, but I think that cetain thoughts are non-computational. I like to defend the Lucas-Penrose Thesis, but I am merely a devoted amateur. I have not studied consciousness deeply. It may be possible that the immaterial arises from emergence from the material, but this is not necessary for dualist theories presently. I am interested in the Mary argument, and the split-brain argument, etc.

Consciousness is something very definite that we all know about that is beyond the reach of science. While it is perfectly reasonable to say all the behaviour of an a creature (such as us) can be explained in principle by physics, as an interaction of a few trillion trillion trillion particles, this viewpoint falls down when we consider our own consciousness.

Ask yourself, how is it that I perceive the world through my point of view (and not another)? What is this thing I call "I" that I am conscious of and has a quite different role to the "I"s of other people to me. How can I be conscious that I am me if I am merely an inanimate collection of particles? Why am I me and not someone else? Isn't it a strange co-incidence that I happen to be a human at a tiny portion of history which is far more advanced in many ways than before the Industrial Revolution, and is it another co-incidence that I am a human rather than being something else? But then perhaps I would not ask this question, which might encourage application of some handy principle to explain such "co-incidences". Etc.

Conscience is the 6th light sense. Actually, I read the back of a book I never bought and it said something about an "I" that is like a particle really tiny in our brains and it is our conscience but at the same time is bound to the laws of physics. I have trouble believing that, which is one of the reasons I happen to be a spiritualist. Or perhaps all we are are very complicated robots with high level ai. Robots can be built to experience pain, think, and do many things we humans can do. I once got into an arguement with someone about whether or not a robot can be living. Emotions may really just be some weird chemical reactions in our brains.

Emotions definitely are physical processes in the brain. The bit we can't deal with adequately in science is our perception of those emotions, and what the "I" is that perceives them. Can you believe that you and your consciousness are nothing but a physical process?

Think 'soul'...

First off, thanks to everyone's responses.

Thought about going through them and answering specific points, but have been working on just getting to the point. Much material thought was put forth, and I have much gratitude.

At the age of 17, had the "what if everything I've ever been taught was wrong?" moment.

Did the whole pursuit of truth gig.

Because my mind was never geared/pushed towards math, took the path of philosophical and spiritual studies. And, after all, my belief at the time, was that science was limited and very much mired in dualism.

Quickly discounted anything to do with the Judeo-Christian system. The number of logical fallacies connected with the concept of an inherently existent creator God were just too many to number.

Western philosophy, although having many good points, still always seemed to get stuck in seeing things dualistically (obviously, some exceptions...hello my friends Spinoza and Schopenhauer!)

Kept coming back to Eastern thought, because they didn't talk about the soul, which there is absolutely no proof for. They focused on the mind.

After years of looking at all the various traditions, particularly in Buddhism, discovered what's called the Madyamika-Prasangika philosophy. Was shocked I'd never heard of it before.

Now, back in the earlier part of the first millenium, if you were a king, a nobleman, a scholar, at least in the Eastern half of the world, you would go to India, to study at a major university (also part monastery), such as Nalanda University.

Buddha was alive around 500 BC, his teachings spread, various versions here and there.

But these Indians at Nalanda, etc. took his teachings to a whole new level.

And my gut tells me, if these scholars from Nalanda were alive today, they'd be the ones working with the CERN super collider or Hubble telescope or mapping the human genome.

This philosophy that they worked on, ripped apart til only perfection remained, is probably the purest philosophical system I've ever discovered.

Defining terms, use of logic, functionality. When I discovered it, it was as if no one had ever heard of the Greek philosophers, and then BAM!...here it all is, placed in front of you.

Now, the thing is, when one mentions Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, lots of baggage is associated with it. Lots of negative baggage. Mysticism, incense, hippies, karma, etc.

But, after all I've studied, including with a monk/scholar who was born and raised in Tibet, and was there when Chinese cannon balls were exploding the walls of his monastery's library, I think it's safe to say that most who've heard of Buddhism, even most who think they're practitioners, haven't really done so.

That's a whole other story.

The point I'm getting at now, is simply this. In the Indo-Tibetan tradition, one HAS to accept logic. And, to even paraphrase the Dalai Lama himself, if science proves something, a good Buddhist would accept it as fact.

Love that. No "faith" involved. For, after all, I think it's safe to simply say, faith is what people have when they want to believe in something they know isn't true, or, simply just don't have any evidence of.

What does any of this have to do with consciousness?

Since the mind is so important to the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition, they've written much about it, have come up with exacting definitions of what it, and it's functions are, and have used logic to discount common misperceptions related to mind, self, emotion, etc.

And the defining characteristics of the mind? What makes the mind the mind?

Simply put, it is non-physical, clear, and aware.

Obviously, the brain itself is a major factor. The physical is not completely ruled out, for that defies logic.

Think about it, and it makes sense. Consciousness is a state of awareness. It's not a physical thing. Can't be cut, burned, chopped up. You can't take this moment of awareness and contain it.

After having been in these studies for over a decade, looking at the mind and it's functions put under a microscope on so many levels, I started to notice that science was catching up with the Indo-Tibetan tradition in several ways. Again, too much to go into at the moment.

So, now we live in a world where multiple levels of reality are seriously being considered. Light can be both particles and waves. Multiple dimensions are needed to explain string theory. Neutrinos seem to pop in and out of existence. When a particle is measured for speed, it's location can't be known, but if it's location is known, it's speed can't be measured. Whether an observer (a subject) is looking at an object has an effect on that object.

Suddenly, things that are discussed in the Indo-Tibetan tradition don't look so radical.

Now, according to the Madyamika-Prasangika philosophy, the term "real" is never used. There's "the true nature of things" or their "ultimate nature," which is simply that things lack inherent existence, and all of one's existence is conceptually designated. Yet, simultaneaously, we do share a world, not one where things are "real" though. The term they use is "functional."

Functionally, fire burns. Ultimately, every single thing that makes up fire is based on conceptual designation.

And that conceptual designation arises from causes and conditions, particularly from the brain, and awareness.

But, the concepts that arise in the mind? In the Indo-Tibetan tradition, they're called "bak-chaks," loosely translated as "mental imprints."

And this is where I get stuck. These "mental imprints" along with awareness, are simply described as "non-physical" things. Energies perhaps?

So, what my mind keeps coming back to now, is science, with it's advanced states of technology, ever going to identify these subtle energies, operating withing this clear sphere of awareness? Or even identify this "field" that the energies operate within?

Is this state of awareness somehow interacting with neutrinos or maybe other particles that we're not even aware of yet?

So much for being brief. If you've read this far, I truly appreciate you taking the time to do so.

Trying to reach for something that Indo-Tibetan logic puts forth two thousand years ago, and hoping a marriage will occur with what scientists are looking at, and pursuing today.

It's been a couple of years since I dove into studying theoretical physics, quantuum physics, relativity, etc. Trying to tie it in with "conceptual designation is the foundation of the ultimate nature of things."

Again, thanks.

Thank you Steve, and everybody else. That was very enlightening to me!

These "mental imprints" sound very functional in my mind.

Hey Dude, you have an interesting view on consciousness. I like the term "state of awareness" however I have some questions.If consciousness is not material than how is it that some people loose it, people with mental disorders.I don't think that a schizophrenic is really "aware" of anything, or someone who had a really shocking experience in his/her life and went mad.All I'm saying is that there are people who live yet they have lost at least partly their consciousness, and if damage to the brain can trigger this it means that it has to be a material phenomenon.I don't know much about this stuff so please correct me if I'm wrong!

Speaking about memories, aren't they stored information?Our brain is big so it's plenty of space there.I've heard that everything that happened to you is recorded in the brain but some of these things you forget which means that the synapses that "lead" to that particular information are not working anymore, but the info is there.If we can record information on a hard disk than why not in our brain which is a way more advanced system.

Instincts are survival functions, aren't they?The instinct to eat, reproduce, survive, etc...

I don't really know what to say about psychic abilities.It may still be uncharted territory given that much of our brain is unknown.The truth is that it's hard to believe that someone can affect something out of his body using only the brain.I saw on Discovery that detectives where using psychics to find dead bodies,criminals or else...It's way too weird for me.I think that psychic abilities are not real, or at least a big part of those that are spoken about in the media.

BTW, what do you people say about hypnosis? Does anybody know how it works? As far as I know it is used to bring back lost memories but how is it done?Is it real?

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Sounds like you are a student of Surak.

From my study of psychics, you know when you find a true psychic.   There are many out there who claim to have ability, but really do not.  To me, psychic ability is the sixth sense as it seems as natural to me as any other sense.  I hardly consider myself a psychic by any means.  There are varying degrees of strength between psychics.  For example, I talked about a specific movie that I liked that I have not watched in a long time, yet nobody mentioned it to me earlier.  An hour later, the person I was talking to said they watched that movie in class.  Go figure.  I have tried card reading before, but it requires immense concentration to get the exact suit and number correct.  I had the exact card suit and number correct about 50% of the time.  Not too shabby for a lousy psychic.

As for hypnosis, I have witnessed people hypnotised into doing different stunts or saying something rediculous before.  People I knew too.  The hypnotist claimed that it could work on anybody, but it would be difficult for people like me because we question what he does too much.  For example, he would say, "you have two weights in your outstretched hands.  One is heavier than the other."

Why?

Hypnosis could help for lost memories, but what it is good for is to find triggers in your mind like anxiety regarding work and turning them off.  It is a way to get around your natural barriers to the world to find out why you are doing so. 

Fascinating.

You guys are funny, but I won't say fascinating. I find your experiences interesting. Speaking of psychics, I love it when Michael Shermer does fun stuff about that-one of my favorites was when Shermer pretended to be a psychic on the radio under the name of Sri Leachim Remresh. Hint: read backwards.

Yup. I'm trying to discuss conceptual designation and it's relation to quantum physics, with awareness being the field of function.

Psychics, hypnosis, etc. etc. not my cup of tea. And even within the tradition of Buddhism that I study, there's a clear distinction between "interpretable" and "definitive." Any and all tales related to psychics, "miracles," etc. is considered "interpretable." Anything related to logic, and the true nature of things, is definitive.

From what I gathered, according to the Indo-Tibetan tradition, supposed "psychic powers" aren't even worth thinking about. The only true things that are "miraculous" in nature involve people actually being kind to each other, and understanding that this world functions according to cause and effect, not blind faith and superstition.

Again, thanks for everyone's input.

The search continues.

Most theists don't mean to be arrogant when they say they have the answers to things, though. Of course, not all could be correct on relativism, but you have to realize that if bigger questions then consciousness have conclusions, then they would likely produce implications for consciousness. Therefore I prefer to think about as many fundamental issues as I can in tandem.

Mr. Quark, thanks for being.

<laughing good heartedly>

On reflection I am willing to believe that I am merely a physical process, and any thoughts that my consciousness is something beyond this is merely because of the naturally egocentric point of view that this process has.

There are many who put forth that's all we are. Organic organisms who's consciousness simply arises from chemical processes and nerve endings.

But, then how does one define "physical?"

If one keeps breaking down the "physical" properties of any functioning thing, gets past atoms, sub-atomic particles, entering the realms of quarks, neutrinos, things we don't even know about, is it still physical?

And to top that all off, everything one experiences...sight, sound, taste, touch, feeling, even thought itself....is based on conceptual designation. An object cannot exist without a subject, and vice-versa.

And not even using Eastern thought, but lets say Spinoza, there is no duality. Everything that exists is of the same essence.

So, everything is of the same essence and based on conceptual designation, and at it's most fundamental level doesn't have a course physical structure, then, finding how all this arises in the nexus of consciousness, things can get interesting. But, science, at this stage, is still limited.

To go all Yoda, beings of light are we, not this crude matter.

My point was that my long-held feeling that this "I" which I know as my point of view merely seems special and different to other physical processes because it is this physical process that is thinking about this.

(laughing) I hear ya Elroch.

That's the problem, and VERY different to overcome!

If it were easy to do, there'd be no war.