(April 3, 2015 at 9:53 am)Norman Humann Wrote: As for the comforting part, well... did you know that children become self-aware only at the age of two? Consciousness is a product of a working brain. Once the brain generating it is damaged or dead, the consciousness ends. Think about people who have amnesia. Memories are what makes us who we are, among other things. After we lose them, we become someone else. Or take lobotomy, for example.
I have long been interested in neurology and have thought long and hard about consciousness, and as far as I can tell, the only thing we can identify is coherent thought and the ability to lay down events as memories and recall them later. You could have consciousness without coherence or memory, and vice versa, and it seems people are just conflating them when they say any studies have learned anything about consciousness. The fact that we can't remember being asleep, or remember being a baby, doesn't mean there is no consciousness during those times, it just means we have no memory of anything, for what could be any one of a number of reasons.
