The dying of the brain teaches us that our subjective experiences are neurochemical results.
"Where does the experience of the color red reside in your brain?" Deepak Chopra asked me at the sages and scientists conference he held on March 3, 2012 in Carlsbad, California. A group of lecturers argued at the conference that the fact that neuroscientists do not have a complete theory that explains how neural activity translates into conscious experiences (such as "edema") indicates that a physical approach [to understanding consciousness] is a flawed or wrong approach. "The idea that it is electrochemical activity that gives rise to the subjective experiences is still a hypothesis," Chopra elaborated on the subject in a letter he sent to me by email. "The idea is just as speculative as the idea that consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon that causes brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world."
"Where is Aunt Millie's soul when she is dying of Alzheimer's disease?" I answered Chopra. "Aunt Millie was an ephemeral behavior pattern of the universe and she returned to the potential from which she emerged," Chopra replied. "In the philosophical framework of the Eastern traditions, the identity of the ego is an illusion, and the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal identity that is neither local nor material."
However, the hypothesis that the mind creates consciousness has much more supporting evidence than the hypothesis that consciousness creates the mind. For example, damage to the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe of the brain causes blindness to faces, while stimulation of this area causes people to see faces spontaneously. Damage caused by a stroke to the visual area of the cerebral cortex, labeled V1, results in the loss of conscious visual perception. It is possible to directly measure changes in conscious experiences using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) and recording the activity of single nerve cells. Neuroscientists are able to predict the choices a person will make by scanning their brain activity even before the subject is aware of their decisions. Neuroscientists were able to reproduce, on the computer screen, what a certain subject sees solely through brain scans.
Credit: Brian Cairns
Thousands of experiments confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences. The fact that there is no agreement among neuroscientists on the best physical theory to explain the mind does not support that the hypothesis that consciousness is the creator of matter is equally acceptable. In his defense, Chopra sent me an article published in 2008 by cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman of the University of California at Irvine in the journal Mind and Matter entitled "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem." The idea of conscious realism "asserts that the objective world, that is, the world whose existence does not depend on the perception of any observer, consists solely of conscious factors." Consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon in the universe that gives rise to particles and fields. "Ain is a guest who arrived not long ago into the developmental history of the universe and arose out of the complex mutual reactions occurring in unconscious matter and fields," Hoffman writes. "In the beginning was consciousness. Matter and fields depend on it for their very existence.”
Where is the evidence that consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon in the universe? Here Hoffman turns to the way in which human observers "put together the visual shapes, colors, textures, and movements of objects." He claims that our senses do not form an approximate estimate of physical reality in the brain, but operate in a way that is more similar to a graphical user interface system that hardly resembles what actually happens on a computer. In Hoffmann's opinion, our senses work to compose reality and not to reproduce it. Moreover, they "do not depend on the hypothesis of the independent existence of physical objects."
How does consciousness cause matter to materialize? We do not receive an answer. Where (and how) did consciousness exist before there was matter? We are left wondering. All I can say is that the evidence all supports that the mind creates the mind and that there is no evidence to support the reversal of cause and effect. In fact, this whole line of thought seems to be based on an argument similar to the "God of the Gaps" argument, according to which the gaps in physics are filled by non-physical factors, whether they are omnipotent beings or conscious factors.
No one will deny that the issue of consciousness is a difficult problem. But before we elevate consciousness to the rank of a tangible agent capable of creating its own reality, let us first try to explore the hypotheses that already exist about how the mind creates the mind. Since we know for certain that measurable consciousness dies when the mind dies, then until proven otherwise, our default hypothesis must be that the mind is the cause of consciousness. I exist, which means I think.
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About the author
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com his new book is The Believing Mind. Follow him on Twitter: @michaelshermer
14 תגובות
for "reaction". My inclination is to agree with you. What else ? Just this month, an article was published in a popular newspaper about people who suffer from a defect because of which they are unable or with great difficulty to recognize another person, unless they train themselves to give them signs (the one smiling with the big ears is my son's friend, etc.). One of the women interviewed for the article claimed that she doesn't recognize herself in the mirror, and it often happens to her when she passes a mirror on the street that she thinks she recognizes someone she knows and waves goodbye to herself.
These people apart from this flaw are functioning well.
Would you say that these people have no consciousness?
"to the point"
Very Good. Not only that, but also:
We live, neither in the Matrix nor in the El Nabi splash. We live in a reality that the facts (on which our senses rely) indicate that monkeys have consciousness (in the way you presented).
As can be understood from your response: man also preceded the computer.
And the brain is an organ of the body.
It is the human mind that dictates to the computer what to do. If the person decides that a definition of consciousness is X, and the application of 'X' in a computational system is a characteristic of consciousness, then only in this way will the person recognize the system's computer as having consciousness.
Whoever writes software that recognizes a mirror figure, starts from understanding the concept of what a mirror is, where it is in space and where it is. In this case, the software is attached to the author, so it can be seen as a component that has ads.
Since no one wrote this software and implemented it in the monkey, awareness is part of the monkey's essence.
point,
What you say is not so accurate. For example, today there is no search engine that you can show a picture to and tell it, you will find more pictures of this object. Therefore, the software may be able to recognize a specific image of itself, but not different images in different situations, just as humans can.
But you are right in your question, is identifying yourself in a picture awareness? If the software is not able to recognize different objects in different situations and not only itself, then the problem here is not awareness, but more visual processing ability.
This connects with what I said before, that the problem is first of all what consciousness is, and in the way we try to find out, we will find many phenomena that we previously thought were part of consciousness, and we will discover that they are separate phenomena.
True, they didn't just sit and decide. They did it out of helplessness on the one hand and great need on the other.
And about the monkey. There is no problem in writing unconscious software that will run a camera that will only recognize itself in the mirror or even learn to recognize itself in the mirror.
Point, they didn't "just" sit down and decide, there is quite a bit of logic in this test. What is your explanation for the results? Why does a monkey who sees a reflection in a mirror raise a hand and try to clean a stain from his forehead that he sees on the forehead of the monkey reflected in front of him? Why would he do this if he has no mental understanding that the figure in the mirror represents him?
The article tries to take a complicated subject, in a field where we probably don't have the appropriate technology and knowledge at this point in time to fully understand it, and simplify it.
The research is still in its infancy, so we do not yet have the possibility to understand all its implications.
The article claims to explain what consciousness is, when it is not at all clear what the definition of consciousness is. This is one of those things that we all know exists, but no one is able to point to it and say: this is consciousness and this is not...
We are approaching this goal with small steps. But it seems to me that this is one of the last questions that can be answered.
In my humble opinion, it seems to me that before we can say what consciousness is, we can say what it is not, or at all we will need a dictionary of new concepts that defines a multitude of phenomena that were previously included under the definition consciousness.
The problem with defining consciousness as something mystical or spiritual is that this definition cannot be scientific, because it does not produce physical events that can be measured in a laboratory and refuted or confirmed.
In addition to this, it originates not in research but in tradition, and it is a complicated definition that requires the existence of a set of new concepts and physical conditions for science. Therefore according to "Ockham's Razor" this definition will never be inferior to the other definitions.
תגובה
Several people sat with them and decided that if the monkey recognizes itself in the mirror it means that it has self-awareness.
There is nothing between this arbitrary decision and consciousness.
I actually know one test (and I imagine there are more) that allows measuring self-awareness at least to a certain level. While playing without the subject noticing, a stain is painted on his forehead, some time later a mirror is placed in front of him.
An animal that has awareness will see its reflection in the mirror, will understand that it represents it and will try to clean its forehead while using the mirror.
The experiment was successfully performed with small children (age 3 I think) and with chimpanzees.
An animal that has no awareness will think that the figure in the mirror is another animal.
A scrambled article that has nothing to do with the facts.
One example:
"Measurable consciousness" No instrument has ever been invented or even an idea has been raised as to how consciousness can be measured at all. And of course they didn't measure consciousness.
All the findings show that our thoughts, feelings and self-awareness are all the result of electrical chemical activity in the physical brain. Whoever makes delusional claims about an "immaterial soul" bears the burden of proof.
Indeed, much is hidden from the visible in the study of the soul and belongs to a physical system, the interaction between it and the mind, is as if impossible, because there is no idea where to begin to quantify or measure the soul, but on the other hand the connection seems quite clear even if it is hidden. I wonder who will pick up the glove, a very fascinating field.
Pafner, fascinating response, thank you.
"Let us first try to explore the hypotheses that already exist about how the mind creates the mind."
The problem is that there are no such hypotheses. Yes, we are told that the mind is like software in a computer or something like that, but this is a hypothesis that lacks scientific foundation just like any wild dualistic hypothesis (we can't even begin to imagine how such an explanation is supposed to work), so we have no a priori reason to reject dualistic explanations or pan-psychic.
"Since we know for certain that measurable consciousness dies when the brain dies, then until proven otherwise, our default hypothesis must be that the brain is the cause of consciousness. "
"Thousands of experiments confirm the hypothesis that neurochemical processes produce subjective experiences."
The question is not whether the brain creates consciousness, but by what it creates it. It is possible that the brain contains mental "particles" that are not reducible to physics, an assumption completely consistent with everything we know from neuroscience. It is possible that the brain states only mediate between the behavior and the non-physical mental states that "sit" on them.
"The fact that there is no agreement among neuroscientists on the best physical theory to explain the mind does not support that the hypothesis that consciousness is the creator of matter is equally acceptable."
This is no longer a scientific but a metaphysical claim. Physicists have not yet said the last word regarding the most basic structure of reality (and they are the first to admit it), it may be that reality is actually mental at its core, when it appears to us as "inanimate" matter only at the level of phenomena. Is there any evidence that the reality is not like this?
An even bigger problem is the dilemma of the waterfall, which shows that it is not even possible to define the physicalist/materialist thesis in a non-trivial way. The question is, what does it mean to say that the mind is physical? Do we mean current physics or some future physics? If you mean the current physics, then it is most likely wrong or incomplete and in the future we will find better alternative theories (and we currently with the current physics cannot explain the mind so whatever the explanation, it needed something more than the current physics). However, if we are talking about future physics, we have no idea what it will look like. It is possible that future physics will discover that in reality there are mental properties that cannot be reduced to anything else, and if so, would we want to say that physicalism is real? Or let's say that everything that future physics discovers will be considered physicalism, then physicalism is simply emptied of its content (because by definition even if we find properties that are dualistic in terms of modern physics they will be physicalist according to future physics), but if we say that the dualistic properties that we can discover in the future will be considered without physicality we We cannot define "non-physical" according to current physics because it is wrong or incomplete, therefore either physicalism is false or we have no idea what we actually mean by "physicalism".