Consciousness

[Paleophyte]

Cute strawman from a nut who believes that goddunnit.

Unconsciousness cannot cause consciousness. The Principle of Causality states that the Cause is always (yes. always) greater than the Effect.

The principle of causality states that cause precedes effect. "Greater" is a subjective term with no bearing on causality.

[snowtracks]

The way the most atheists explain it: An amoeba hatched a dinosauric, then birds evolved. Then there was a series of advantageous mutations for bipedal locomotion & brain organ development, then alas, consciousness.

I know of no atheists who explain it that way, But I do know a lot of Christians who explain it away by invoking magic.

Now go play with your dolly. Grown-ups are talking.

Boru

Then sit down, listen and stop yammering about nonsense.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I know of no atheists who explain it that way, But I do know a lot of Christians who explain it away by invoking magic.

Now go play with your dolly. Grown-ups are talking.

Boru

Then sit down, listen and stop yammering about nonsense.

You first.

Boru

[Ravenshire]

But that's not even what I'm doing?

Sure it is. You're disagreeing with them, and saying that those who don't agree with you are "stupid" and "arrogant." You're certainly not calling them stupid because you've given them an IQ test, after all. The only qualifier for intelligence in your post is whether or not another person sees things your way.

If you can't see that this is the ineluctable conclusion to be drawn from your post, you probably shouldn't be calling others stupid.

There are reasons I tossed that nit-wit on ignore and left them there.

[AFTT47]

They (scientists) aren't touching the hard problem though. That's not something that can be solved by science. How consciousness or subjective experience could emerge from non-consciousness isn't something science can answer.

I definitely agree with that for now. I suspect there is a whole new body of knowledge that is currently over our horizon. With that yet to be learned knowledge, the scientific method might then be applied. But it might be as far beyond us as modern physics is to a cave man.

[The Grand Nudger]

Its not uniformly accepted that there is a hard problem. So the fact that a bunch of people who think there isn't aren't working on it is not actually remarkable. It's like laplace reportedly said to napolean when asked where god was in his cosmos. They have no need of that hypothesis. Contrary to popular belief, the aspects of subjective experience that vex the subjective and intuitive mind are not equally obscure or hidden to the scientific and objective one.

[Alan V]

Unconsciousness cannot cause consciousness.

Our brainstems turn on and off our consciousness through the cycles of waking, sleeping, and dreaming.  This process depends on both neuromodulation and activation or deactivation.  Yet the brainstem is not conscious itself.

Per Google:

While the brainstem is crucial for wakefulness and basic life functions, it's not considered the seat of consciousness in the way the cerebral cortex is. The brainstem plays a role in consciousness, particularly in wakefulness and arousal, but complex conscious experiences are thought to arise from the interaction of the brainstem with other brain regions like the cerebral cortex and thalamus.
...
Lesions in specific areas of the brainstem, like the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum, can lead to coma, further highlighting the brainstem's role in maintaining wakefulness and its connection to overall consciousness, according to Harvard Medical School.

[Ahriman]

The brain stem sounds a lot more important than any other part of the brain.

[Alan V]

The brain stem sounds a lot more important than any other part of the brain.

Per Google, in addition to regulating conscious states the brainstem:

* "Is crucial for regulating many essential bodily functions -- it controls vital processes like breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure;"
* "Influences digestion, swallowing, and other involuntary bodily processes;"
* "Acts as a major pathway for sensory and motor information traveling between the brain and the spinal cord;"
* "Houses the nuclei for most of the cranial nerves, which control facial expressions, eye movements, hearing, taste, and other functions;"
* "Plays a role in movement and coordination, including posture and balance."

Similarly, the cerebellum is not considered a part of the conscious brain, yet it "plays a crucial role in coordinating movement, maintaining balance, and regulating muscle tone. It also contributes to motor learning, fine-tuning movements through practice. Recent research suggests the cerebellum's functions extend beyond motor control to include cognitive processes like language and possibly even emotional regulation."

When people talk about it taking 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, they are largely talking about training the cerebellum.

So the brain controls a lot of automatic, unconscious, and habitual processes. Consciousness is just one of its functions.

[Alan V]

In this post, I referred to consciousness as "abstract information processing."  To clarify, the brain processes information both consciously and unconsciously, as I made clear in this post in another discussion.  The difference is in how that information is processed, with consciousness employing a brain-wide strategy which can account, at least in part, for the hard problem of qualia.  Conscious access to the information being processed is necessary for it to qualify as qualia (subjective sensory perceptions), though qualia are a subset of what we can be conscious of.  We can also be conscious of our own abstract thoughts or memories, for other examples of conscious access.  

Looked at from the point of view of conscious access, qualia are just one variety of information which we then may or may not process further.  Conscious access can be considered the brain's selective focus on what it considers most important at any given moment. Interestingly, for qualia to even reach consciousness, they must be processed unconsciously before we can notice them. It seems likely, therefore, that some of the more distinctive characteristics of qualia, like color for instance, are in part the results of that unconscious processing. In that sense, qualia can be tackled by brain science, and are not just "givens" or brute facts.