What is Consciousness?

[Kyuuketsuki]

Yeah, but it's treated like a red-headed stepchild.

What is wrong with redheads? Be careful answering that :/

Case in point: A neurologist I was talking to about a year ago said she didn't believe in psychiatry, and believed eventually all of psychiatry would be rolled into neurology. Currently, both neurologists and psychiatrists are certified by the same board. And why did she believe this? Because no matter what the psychiatric condition, it still only had to do with the functions of the brain.

I'm not seeing a problem here.

Consciousness is treated as a kind of anomaly of the brain. But I'm suggesting it's more like a force of nature similar to the other forces. I propose that consciousness is actually out there, and we receive it. We don't generate it.

And I'd suggest that's complete and utter rubbish ... there is absolutely no evidence beyond healthy imagination that consciousness resides anywhere but the brain.

Of course I can't prove that yet. I may be able to make some philosophical arguments for it, but I want more than that.

Have fun with that, knock yourself out.

Personally I believe that all advanced animals have levels of conciousness and that humans only happen to be the ones that have made larger strides in that area (presumably due to evolutionary luck).

So, you think evolution is just kind of expanding without any direction. In other words, you don't believe there is any goal in mind when it comes to the evolution of species. We are just here for no reason at all? But that can't be what you believe, because you said "luck." You seem to believe it's lucky that humans have advanced consciousness. Why?

On the available evidence I don't think it is reasonable to conclude we are anything else other than the "chance" (though arguably inevitable) product of an uncaring universe, yes.

I think there is no verifiable evidence for precognition and no, I do not think nature or the universe is in any way becoming self-aware.

I don't think there can be any verifiable evidence for precognition. (1) It occurs randomnly to those who experience it. (2) There doesn't seem to be anything that stimulates it. So based on 1 and 2 it can't be duplicated, which puts its determination and measurment outside of the scientific method.

1. No, it doesn't ... there have never been any validated cases of precognition (None that can't be otherwise interpreted as either chance accuracy or reasonably intelligent informed guesswork) that I am aware of.
2. That's because it doesn't happen.

So based on 1 & 2 it's not measurable (on account of it not happening).

Also, I'm not sure it can be tested in the sense of using it as a predictive tool. If one has a precognitive episode, they wouldn't know it until it happened.

And then gets reinterpreted afterwards to fit with hindsight ... how very, jolly convenient.

Case in point: I had a dream that my wife and I and our dogs were in a terrible car accident. It seemed like the type of dream I had had in the past that turned out to be precognitive. We delayed our trip 15 minutes, and in so doing we came up to the Hoover damn 15 minutes later than we would have at around midnight. We stopped our car to look at our map to make sure we were on the right track and a car came from the direction of the damn, stopped and told us the road was out over the damn. Thus we turned around and went an alternate way.

If that dream was precognitive, I'll never know. Actually, I do know. It wasn't precognitive. The event never happened. But would it have happened?

I will offer you the exact same challenge I offered Frodo ... predict something. Something beyond the normal ability of humans to make intelligent informed guesses and/or lucky guess. When you've done that and when objective observers have assessed it as being an accurate and correct prediction THEN come back and I will treat it seriously.

I've had many instances of precognition, but I can't convince anyone of them, because I didn't know it was precognition until the event occurred and then it was too late to say I knew it before hand. So, I'm not trying to convince anyone that I've had precognition. That's why I pose the question as a hypothetical: if precognition was true, how would that change our ideas of consciousness.

Good because you haven't convinced me that your worldview is anything other than some kind of god-substitute.

I ask you to entertain the possibility, not believe one way or another. If you can't do that, okay. But it's not unusual to ask you to. Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment; that's all I'm asking you to do is a thought experiment.

Schrödinger's Cat makes some kind of sense in quantum physic terms; precognition doesn't fit with anything currently known but fits perfectly with the kind of claims flakes the world over make, the kind of claims that whenever science turns it's eye to them collapse under rational and objective scrutiny.

I must say, though, as for the universe becoming self-aware, you seem dichotomous. You say it is not, yet you admit consciousness exists within the universe. Thus the universe contains consciousness. How is it then that the universe is not becoming conscious (assuming consciousness is self-awareness)?

Sigh. If the universe itself were becoming conscious then my consciousness would be part of a greater whole ... it isn't, it is separate, distinct, apart; so no ... the universe shows absolutely no evidence of becoming aware.

Kyu