Asking where you go after death is like asking where the music goes when the band stops playing... it only exists in the memory of the people who heard it.

(January 13, 2025 at 5:15 am)zebo-the-fat Wrote: Asking where you go after death is like asking where the music goes when the band stops playing...  it only exists in the memory of the people who heard it.

That's lovely! It's like the more poetical version of, 'Expecting consciousness to survive death is like expecting 100mph to survive the crash of the car.'

Boru

(January 13, 2025 at 5:15 am)zebo-the-fat Wrote: Asking where you go after death is like asking where the music goes when the band stops playing...  it only exists in the memory of the people who heard it.

Consciousness is not a substance whose existence has to be explained, but an evolved function of a healthy brain of a certain complexity in a certain chemical and electrical state.  This is upheld by the fact that we lose consciousness or experience only partial consciousness every night when we sleep and dream.  Like you say, wondering where it goes is based on not conceptualizing consciousness correctly.

The problem is that people identify themselves as their consciousness, and they know they exist.  I think this is a holdover from religious dogma, from defining people as souls which inhabit bodies.  We are in fact bodies with brains, not essentially consciousness at all, but we are aware of ourselves only when we are aware at all.

The larger claim here is that something supernatural survives the physical death of a functioning human brain, and since there is no objective evidence that this is possible, this is more than sufficient rational and epistemological reason to withhold belief from any such claim, and claims of an afterlife. 

There is however objective evidence that human consciousness is an emergent property of a functioning human brain. As others have pointed out, when it is impaired, consciousness is impaired, and we can directly connect the impairment to the damaged areas of the brain. consciousness disappears every single time a person's brain dies and never returns without that functioning brain, no exceptions.

I think the real issue with explaining consciousness is how, as a physical phenomena, it appears so different from other physical phenomena. It appears non-physical, more like an abstract.

(January 13, 2025 at 10:21 am)Angrboda Wrote: I think the real issue with explaining consciousness is how, as a physical phenomena, it appears so different from other physical phenomena.  It appears non-physical, more like an abstract.

That's a good way to put it.  Consciousness is the brain's manipulation of abstractions.  So there is no need to reify consciousness at all.

(January 13, 2025 at 10:21 am)Angrboda Wrote: I think the real issue with explaining consciousness is how, as a physical phenomena, it appears so different from other physical phenomena.  It appears non-physical, more like an abstract.

"Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being." - Sartre

Consciousness exists but in so doing it is aware that it is not physically there. Consciousness is a process of filtering stimuli and, as others note, is affected by chemicals (e.g. drugs, neurotransmitters, disease). It's the narrative-creator that creates our perception and story of the world. There's a symphony of science piece from years ago that discusses how information is fed to the brain from our sensory systems and "explodes in a collage" of experience.

Ode to the brain:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB7jSFeVz1U

(January 13, 2025 at 11:50 am)Alan V Wrote:

(January 13, 2025 at 10:21 am)Angrboda Wrote: I think the real issue with explaining consciousness is how, as a physical phenomena, it appears so different from other physical phenomena.  It appears non-physical, more like an abstract.

That's a good way to put it.  Consciousness is the brain's manipulation of abstractions.  So there is no need to reify consciousness at all.

That's the central point of control theories, that consciousness is or reports on a set of a useful abstractions.  Not an accurate view of the systems operation or components.  The simplest machine analogy (and something we know is actually a part of the system itself for a fact) being a body model bounding box.  A bounding box is not an accurate representation of the object.  The inaccuracy of a bounding box is not a glitch or a bug, either... but how it functions as a part of control in a body schema.  The buffer between your edges and a post.  It could be tighter..and if it were tighter you'd be more coordinated, less clumsy but also more prone to near misses.  This happens over the natural course of our lives as we develop from infancy into adulthood, but can also be hurried along by practice and..as ever, harmed by damage to the brain and by the natural degradation of the brain in old age.  At any point, we can get the margin wrong and find ourselves stuck struck or out of luck. In this, consciousness acts exactly like other physical phenomena..though the other physical phenomena it acts like was something we weren't aware of when we were staking all this out.

There are fun implications to this. For example, a mirror test may turn out to be an even more imperfect marker of internal content than we initially thought. It stands to reason that an inaccurate body model might not recognize it's accurate self in a reflection. If bodies can be modeled, can attention be modeled? Does this type of system architecture have multiple uses...and would those multiple uses present themselves as even more (and even more inaccurate) things? Why and how we get wrong what we get wrong is a very productive avenue for studying consciousness.

I would ask if there is any evidence that consciousness exists outside of a physical medium, and then examine or test that evidence to see if it holds up.

My guess? There is none, and it's yet another presupposition that lacks any actual evidence but 'feels' compelling (or intuitive).