consciousness?

[genkaus]

In order for psychoactive drugs to work it is only necessary to affect the way the brain mediates consciousness. You have a long way from there to saying that physical processes generate or cause physical experiences. Right now, the best that can be said is that there is a correlation between neural activity and Felt experience since there is no evidence for a causal link.

On the contrary, that is the evidence of the causal link. If there was simply correlation between the two and not causation, then psychoactive drugs would not affect your consciousness. For example, simple observations of the fact that Oxytocin levels are high in people in love would simply indicate correlation. But a causal link may be established by artificially increasing the hormone levels and seeing if it produces the emotions and feelings of love where they did not exist beforehand.

Your excuse that we can't establish a causal link unless we completely understand the phenomena is bullshit. I don't understand how my laptop works either, but when I see that pressing the power button turns it on, I do not conclude that there is no causal link between the two events.

Suppose the redundant system was not one brain but two. You call a friend to tell him about an idea. Information is relayed across the wire to your friend. Then you forget your idea. Later your friend calls you back and reminds you of the idea. The question is this: are the two brains part of a single consciousness processing entity. If so, then an extremely large, say worldwide, communication network such as exists to today, acts as a single consciousness process of which parts of it are self-aware. (we're talking about it right now). Viola! super- or cosmic consciousness. (this is known as the Chinese telephone thought problem).

Did you misunderstand the China brain problem? It is not about the number of participatory neurons but their arrangement and functionality. You can have the entire collective humanity exchanging and sharing information, but without the requisite systems in place to create an identity it would not be self-aware or conscious. Your example is like saying that since piling on a bunch of brain matter into a heap does not give rise to a conscious entity, there must be something special and non-material about the phenomenon of consciousness.

Books serve as a more rustic version of information storage for the telephonic superconsciousness.

What telephonic super-consciousness?

used this example in order to show that the electrical impulse of the zebra fish was an observed physical event that resulted in physical activity. There is no proof that the zebra fish felt anything at all. No body saw a thought, as the poster claimed, only the result of one. Brain scans would only relocate the problem. Your only things you can observe are physical correlates, not causes. Correlates can be the basis of a reasonable assumption that thought did occur, however in the absence of a theory of causation it is just that, an assumption and not proof. And since that same assuption justifies the belief in absurd positions, like attributing consciousness to simple systems which we have no reason to believe are conscious, that assumption is suspect. In other words, its not nearly as reasonable an assumption as you would like to believe.

Like indicated before, establishing a causal link isn't as difficult as you make it out to be. Look up deep brain stimulation and its application to depression and Tourrette's syndrome.

Your example proves nothing because it begs the question. Removing the indicator of consciousness does not mean consciousness has ceased. If you remove the hands of a clock that doesn't mean the inside gears have stopped working.

There is a very easy way for you to find this out for yourself, you know.

You seem the problem is, it is your position that is inherently biased. You start with the assumption that any consciousness is an ineffable , supernatural entity that can, without any explanation as to how, affect physical phenomena. Then you go on to ignore the mountain of evidence showing that the reverse is true all the while insisting that "you can't prove I'm wrong". You are the one with the biased position and incapable of change in face of mounting evidence.