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Brains, Information, Consciousness
- Thread starter Fool
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Spirit of Light
Be who ever you want
The physical brain is only a receiver in my understanding, the thoughts are not physically inside the brain
really, so they can't be both around and in the brain? like oxygen can be both in and around the body?
Iymus
Active Member
Spirit of Light
Be who ever you want
I am no neuro expert
But for example when we say we have thoughts in or mind, in my understanding that is not inside the brain, the brain only translates the signals into words for us. But I could be wrong of course.
what i'm trying to convey, is that information, that thought isn't only limited to that space outside, around. its both in/out. like broadcasting of a tv signal. the television can tune out/in signals but tuning in doesn't limit to only inside but outside; otherwise others could not receiveI am no neuro expert
osgart
Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Consciousness Cannot Have Evolved
Here I just read this article by Bernardo Kastrup.
Consciousness is said to be irreducible to matter and therefore fundamental.
The two leading hypotheses' are idealism and materialism.
Here I just read this article by Bernardo Kastrup.
Consciousness is said to be irreducible to matter and therefore fundamental.
The two leading hypotheses' are idealism and materialism.
the article talks about the qualitative part of consciousness; which makes sense. western, or quantitative science, can't measure that but we know it exists. its part of our nature and we are part of nature and this is why we have soft sciences
western science can't test what it can't define, control, quantify. and if it can't test it can come up with a mathematical reason. this is the hard problem.
we know people have minds. unfortunately you only have two experiential ways of controlling them: one is fear and the other is love.
Not just the brain but the entire central nervous system receives and processes information.
Conscious just means to have knowledge, be aware of. So a self driving car, for example, would be aware of the road and could be said to be conscious.
Can the "brain" make information? Yes, the brain can imagine possibilities or alternative pasts and futures and use this information as part of it's thinking process. A brain does not make consciousness but it is conscious/aware. Just like we can create a computer system that is aware of its environment.
What is unique is the feeling of being a detached observer. I'd suppose what you are really asking is whether the brain is capable of creating this experienced of being a detached observer.
I don't know, the only way to test this would be to eliminate the brain/CNS completely and see if this feeling persists, beyond physical death. I don't think however there is anyway to be conscious of a physical world without a physical presence
halbhh
The wonder and awe of "all things".
It's a great question, and if you read articles over the years, you'd see times where a group feels they are about to figure it out, unravel what is consciousness.....and then....later on, a new group will come forward with a new theory.....and then later, another....rinse, repeat. After a while (30 years), it starts to look like a pattern: thinking we about have it....but time passes, and that theory sorta gets replaced by the latest new one.
Here's a recent:
Science Still Can't Explain Consciousness, But That Might Soon Change
"might soon change"....
ok ... heh heh
Aupmanyav
Be your own guru
Well, articles, books, lectures by religious luminaries, videos. You can find millions of them on internet.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
No it isnt. That's what I was about to say...
Then I found this 2014 article from live science....
Brain-to-Brain Link Makes 'Mind Control' Possible | Live Science
While it doesn't make the brain a receiver per se, it does open up some plausibility the brain may be more than what we think.
You have to be a bit more careful with respect to at least some of these terms. For example, this:
...is quite true. It is generally agreed among physicists and cosmologists and the like that one can regard all physical systems in terms of or as information. One potential advantage to this level of abstraction is that things like particular symmetries and their corresponding conservation laws become less "loaded" semantically and no longer carry the same kind of implications as does e.g., "matter is neither created nor destroyed". In physics, where we have e.g., physical laws governing the conservation of probabilities in QM, the idea that information is always conserved as quoted above is kind of like the most general conservation law possible. So the so-called black hole wars may have been/are over highly speculative, theoretical situations, but they concern whether or not it is possible for something to violate the most abstract formulation of the most general conservation law in the most complete manner. Susskind's public talk(s) are easy enough to find, but here are some more technical explanations on the matter that are harder to find:
It is difficult to understand what it means to "make information". From an engineering or communications perspective this is fairly clear cut, but it doesn't make that much sense when you ask it of something like consciousness or even the brain (the brain produces a variety of signals that correspond quite appropriately even to classical conceptions of information of the type Shannon was initially interested in, but these signals are of more interest to neuroscientists or medical specialists than to the person whose brain produced them; a slew of other lower level signals are readily understood in terms of biosignaling, but these are too low-level for consciousness-related concepts). From a physics perspective, you can't make information any more than you can destroy it.
Both are created and destroyed, and both are done so in ways that violate conservation laws. However, for the most part when "matter" or "energy" are created or destroyed, the "particles" of energy/matter that violate mass conservation or energy conservation (or the conservation of something that is a function of either, such as momentum) are called "off-shell" and depicted differently in e.g. Feynman diagrams to distinguish them from non-conservation violating processes.
so they become a third thing other than energy/matter, that is offshell particles?
The technical term is "virtual particle" or "virtual process" for this kind of violation of mass/energy conservation in which matter and/or energy is created or destroyed. But as there is no a priori distinction between "real" particles and "virtual" particles (nor any empirical way, even in theory, to determine what properties either might have before some interaction in which they are created, destroyed, conserved, etc.), there's nothing "virtual" about them. Nor is this a third kind of entity. Things aren't made of matter or of energy or of information in any way that is useful to think about unless you are doing calculations in physics ("book-keeping").
"material reality is neither composed of any kind of context-independent building blocks nor are there objects in the sense of an absolute ontology...it is illegitimate to say that the world is made of molecules, atoms, electrons or quarks...Matter, as described by the first principles of quantum theory, resembles matter in the Aristotelian sense: It is not a substance, but the capacity to form patterns."
Primas, H. (2017). Bottom-Up Approaches in Physics. In H. Atmanspracher (Ed.). Knowledge and Time (p. 92).
The term virtual is applied like terms such as "electron" or "quark" or "positron" or "path" or "position" are just fictions we use to more readily enable conceptualization and communication, similarly to how one uses graphs in pre-college mathematics, spacetime diagrams, or Feynman diagrams. "Virtual" means nothing more or less here than "matter" or "energy" that was created resulting in more total mass/energy than there was to begin with or destroyed and resulting in less (hence the violation of conservation. It is not a property inherent to the particles or processes themselves that differentiate them from "real" ones.
Thief
Rogue Theologian
I suspect....energy cannot be destroyed
used as energy or converted into matter
but forever existing
and that is the only reason I sided with Susskind as he argued with Hawkins
but to say a black hole cannot destroy information......not so sure
I think of information.....as form
(note the play of word.....formation)
and the event horizon is a scary line drawn
I suspect the form we call matter CAN be destroyed
crushed back into energy
no info
so maybe I DON'T really side with Susskind …..after all
used as energy or converted into matter
but forever existing
and that is the only reason I sided with Susskind as he argued with Hawkins
but to say a black hole cannot destroy information......not so sure
I think of information.....as form
(note the play of word.....formation)
and the event horizon is a scary line drawn
I suspect the form we call matter CAN be destroyed
crushed back into energy
no info
so maybe I DON'T really side with Susskind …..after all