I like the theory where the consciousness is just a controlled hallucination. That there is no "you" anywhere in there, it's just a big lump of chemical reactions that has built its reality around what it can perceive - sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. It'll adapt to its sensory inputs and start to "understand" what is being fed into it. Without any input from you, it'll start messing about to create this reality for you and make sure that the correct chemicals are released for the appropriate situations. This complicated mess of both sensory inputs and chemicals all comes together to form the mind boggling thing that is you.
So in a way, "you" don't really exist. All you really is, is a huge network of neurons going off in perfect sync, simply responding with the appropriate signals and chemicals based on what it has learnt about the outside world using its sensory inputs. We're just the controlled hallucination the brain has come up with to take charge of what happens.
[QUOTE=Quark:;52863817]The discussion then teeters into whether or not your consciousness is a separate entity than your brain, or if your consciousness only arises due to your brain's activity.[/QUOTE]
i just see consciousness as a property of systems, a force inherent to the universe. like how gravity and mass are intertwined, so are consciousness and information-processing-and-decision-making systems. the more massive something is, the greater its gravitational pull, and the more complex a system is, the greater its conscious experience. something very close to the basic rules of our physical reality, such as an atomic reaction, would have essentially no conscious experience. something more complex but still adhering to a simple ruleset, like single celled organisms, would be significantly more conscious than two hydrogen atoms reacting to an oxygen atom, but comparatively nonexistent to something like us. as a system processes greater amounts information and takes into account more and more variables in its decision-making process, it becomes more conscious.
i would say that humans have an especially high level of consciousness compared to anything else on our planet because of our uniquely complex communication abilities allowing us to take abstract variables into account. a single wolf likely feels love for its pack, but it does not ask what that feeling is, why it is feeling it, or how it is feeling i, it only experiences it. we, or likely an ancestor of ours, began to ask the what, the why, and the how. this lead to greater amounts of information being processed, and more variables to affect the final decision. as language has developed, we began to put words to more concepts in general, and putting a word to a concept makes it real, in a way. a need to ascribe meaning to things likely comes from the most primal parts of consciousness, which is to follow the physical rules of reality, something we do from an atomic level up.
to use a somewhat trite computer analogy, the laws of reality are the coding language, interactions between facets of those laws are the code, and consciousness is the execution. to put it into the context of a human: we receive energy as inputs into our self-contained system, whether it be electrochemical reactions from things like light, sound, and touch or electrochemical reactions from hormones and chemicals either produced or ingested by our system. these inputs are processed according to variables both concrete and abstract. our senses make up such a major part of the programming, or our conscious experience because they're not especially far off from base physical reactions. they deal in things not abstract. our subconscious would be both the vast array of chemical variables we take into account and the abstract variables we have created for ourselves. what we experience as the conscious experience is the execution of that code.
[editline]7th November 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=PredGD;52865089]I like the theory where the consciousness is just a controlled hallucination. That there is no "you" anywhere in there, it's just a big lump of chemical reactions that has built its reality around what it can perceive - sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. It'll adapt to its sensory inputs and start to "understand" what is being fed into it. Without any input from you, it'll start messing about to create this reality for you and make sure that the correct chemicals are released for the appropriate situations. This complicated mess of both sensory inputs and chemicals all comes together to form the mind boggling thing that is you.
So in a way, "you" don't really exist. All you really is, is a huge network of neurons going off in perfect sync, simply responding with the appropriate signals and chemicals based on what it has learnt about the outside world using its sensory inputs. We're just the controlled hallucination the brain has come up with to take charge of what happens.[/QUOTE]
i agree with this theory, though I have found it incomplete. it answers how [i]our[/i] conscious experience comes about, but it doesn't answer the why. why does a hallucinogenic projection come about in a system when exposed to many inputs? it was actually this theory, among several others, which lead me to believe that consciousness is an innate property of the universe.
[QUOTE=Berman Slick;52864717]A mind with a body, I reckon. The mind is what ultimately controls all these cell groups. The cells in your body refresh after 5-7 years, and your brain cells are being made/your brain grows for a good long while in early life, yet your consciousness/mind are fixed. Despite your entire body changing, your mind stays the same, with recollection of events, sensations etc (nostalgia, for instance. Remembering how if felt to be yourself from another time), and is a separate entity.[/QUOTE]
what is the earliest memory you have?
if say for instance its the age of 6, then going by your idea (that the mind and memories are fixed and don't change), then you are left with the problem of the 5-year old "you". Is it really you if you can remember nothing from then and you have no idea what being your 5-year old self was like? Either you have to accept the idea that what /you/ are changes with time much like your body does, or you have to admit that what /you/ are didn't exist before the age of 6
both your brain and body are just a vessel for your genes that enable them to replicate themselves more. the genes are your real shadow government
'I' is just the amalgamation of everything my body is. Just because I can't consciously control every cell of my being doesn't mean it ain't me.
My first memory is literally from the crib. Judging by the color of the wallpaper I remember, I may not have even been one year old.
Of course, the memory itself is just me getting scared of an electric heater with a fan in my room, and crying so eh :v:
[QUOTE=Sobotnik;52866103]what is the earliest memory you have?
if say for instance its the age of 6, then going by your idea (that the mind and memories are fixed and don't change), then you are left with the problem of the 5-year old "you". Is it really you if you can remember nothing from then and you have no idea what being your 5-year old self was like? Either you have to accept the idea that what /you/ are changes with time much like your body does, or you have to admit that what /you/ are didn't exist before the age of 6[/QUOTE]
the general consensus is that for the most part long term memory starts at age 3 give or take a month or two but it's entirely possible to have memories before that if they were especially important or traumatic. for instance I have a distinct and clear memory of the last time I saw my grandpa before he died of a heart attack when I was just a few months old. the memory took place at the nativity bvm cathedral while my parents were planning their wedding. my grandma was carrying me out of the building before handing me off to my mom, at which point my grandpa came up to us and tickled me and said something (presumably something along the lines of bye).
it wasn't until much later when I saw a photograph of that day with a date written on the back that I realized the significance of that memory. it was the first of August, less than a week before he died.
I think consciousness is just a result of all the brain functions put together. If you take away the eyes you no longer perceive anything visually, if you take away the ears you can no longer perceive anything auditory. If you mess with the frontal lobe, you can completely change a personality.
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;52863885]Your brain is fed hormones by a complicated body. It's in large parts neither brain nor body because it necessitates both to have the human experience. What I mean by that is that because your body has its own systems that play into the brain and the brain plays into the body, effectively segmenting the two will be nearly impossible or result in something more akin to cybermen from 2005 dr who.
If we do manage to pull your "conscious" mind from the body we'll need to deal with the hormones and qualia the body provide to actually get something worth having.[/QUOTE]
Reminds me of the [sp] conversation you can have with your own disembodied brain [/sp] In the Fallout: New Vegas expansion, Old World Blues.
Ive always wondered what it would feel like to have your brain isolated from the hormonal contributions etc etc of your body, but kept alive (and if at all possible something close enough to "conscious") through other means. What would you end up thinking? How it would effect a person who returned from such a state?.
You're a body that develops a mind to contextualise the senses that help you survive. We don't choose our bodies like a smash bros fighter, our experience of existence is generated by them. Any afterlife would depend on human innovation.
What's the part of the mind that can't be copied and sort makes our experiences unique? The thing outside looking in?
[QUOTE=RoboChimp;52888935]What's the part of the mind that can't be copied and sort makes our experiences unique? The thing outside looking in?[/QUOTE]
the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertiginous_question]vertiginous question[/url]
How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?
[QUOTE=Mingebox;52863918]So basically, we're going to need good emulators.[/QUOTE]
Does this mean we'll soon be able to download a ROM containing a full neural dump of Adolf Hitler's brain from coolrom.com?
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