(March 7, 2019 at 8:32 pm)bennyboy Wrote: ... I'm saying that given the brain, and only the brain, is the mechanism of human consciousness, we still don't know on what level of organization the most elemental essence of consciousness occurs. If you disagree with this, and you seem very much to want to, you can clear up the mystery by answering this question: on what level of organization does the most elemental essence of consciousness occur?
This is a non-trivial question, because the brain is a layering of very many systems of organization, from fully-integrated brain parts, right down to QM wave functions. Some of those systems of organization are unique to the human brain, and some are not.
We can all agree that the unique flavor of experience that is human being depends on a functioning human brain. But that's not the question-- the question is on what level the simplest elements of subjective experience supervene. What's required that minimal flash-in-the-darkness? At what level of complexity can it be said, "There was no mind, but now there is?"
I think the reductionist route is the wrong one here. There is no atomic unit of consciousness. Consciousness is a process. It involves the creation of a sense of self. That 'self' experiences the input through filters of past experience, recreates the past through memory, and extrapolates the future through imagination. The structure of the brain has been evolved over hundreds of millions of years to create consciousness, so that the cells in our body can live.
The brain experiences the world. The more complexity, the richer the experience. I have no idea at what complexity level a brain needs for consciousness (i.e. is a nematode conscious?), but I expect there is a minimum, after which there are degrees. But, I do not believe that the seat of consciousness exists at some reductionist level, like quantum mechanics. It is a complex process, not a thing.
On the very slim chance that Quantum Mechanics has anything to do with consciousness (and I don't believe it does, beyond the fact that QM is the source of all physics and chemistry), QM teaches that the two most fundamental 'things' in the universe are information and events. I suggest that anything that can exist, must be possible to create from these two things.
It is one of the reasons why I don't believe in a supernatural soul. Such a 'soul' would have to be constructed of information and events to exist. Why postulate some eternal plane for it to exist on, when it can exist in the material universe?
