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  • Originally posted by Tassman View Post

    Not so. We are conscious of our consciousness and we are aware that others (and many animals) similarly have consciousness. As previously listed, neuroscientists have several tools for exploring the physical evidence in the living brain for consciousness.
    That was not Harris' point - if we were not already conscious there would be no physical evidence of it in the world. Nothing about the physical brain would attest to it. Water would still be wet even if there were no creatures aware of wetness. Most creatures, as far as we know, are not self aware (only a handful possibly are). What is the physical difference in brains that are self-aware and ones that are not?






    Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

    Comment


    • Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post

      Failure to answer . . . There is absolutely no evidence for any other cause for human and animal consciousness than the brain.
      Another argument from ignorance?
      Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

      Comment


      • Originally posted by seer View Post

        Another argument from ignorance?
        No, argument by the objective verifiable evidence for the cause of consciousness in humans and animals, which exists in all animals with a complex nervous system.

        Methodological Naturalism requires objective verifiable evidence to justify a falsifiable hypothesis. There is absolutely none for any other cause then falsifiable Natural causes. The Lurch has also posted this.
        Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
        Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
        But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

        go with the flow the river knows . . .

        Frank

        I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

        Comment


        • Research on the relationship between the brain and conscious has greatly increased to the point of treatment of illness, injuries and neurological conditions.

          Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02207-1



          Decoding the neuroscience of consciousness

          A growing understanding of consciousness could lead to fresh treatments for brain injuries and phobias.

          In the 1990s, neuroscientist Melvyn Goodale began to study people with a condition called visual form agnosia. Such individuals cannot consciously see the shape or orientation of objects, yet act as though they can. “If you hold up a pencil in front of them and ask them if it’s horizontal or vertical, they cannot tell you,” says Goodale, founding director of the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in London, Canada. “But remarkably, they can reach out and grab that pencil, orienting their hand correctly as they reach out to make contact with it.”



          Part of Nature Outlook: The brain

          Goodale’s initial interest related to how the brain processes vision. But as his work to document the two visual systems that govern conscious and unconscious sight progressed, it caught the eye of philosophers, who drew him into conversations about consciousness — a melding of fields that has transformed both.

          Newly developed techniques for measuring brain activity are enabling scientists to refine their theories about what consciousness is, how it forms in the brain and where the boundaries lie between being conscious and unconscious. And as our understanding of consciousness improves, some researchers are beginning to build strategies for its manipulation, with the possibility of treating brain injuries, phobias and mental-health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and schizophrenia.

          But even as research progresses, and ideas from science and philosophy continue to meld, essential questions remain unanswered. “It’s still just fundamentally mysterious how consciousness happens,” says Anil Seth, a cognitive and computational neuroscientist and co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
          Detective story


          Consciousness is often described as the mind’s subjective experience. Whereas a basic robot can unconsciously detect conditions such as colour, temperature or sound, consciousness describes the qualitative feeling that is associated with those perceptions, together with the deeper processes of reflection, communication and thought, says Matthias Michel, a philosopher of science and a PhD student at Sorbonne University in Paris.

          By the second half of the nineteenth century, scientists had developed a programme for studying consciousness that resembles present approaches, Michel says. But research lulled throughout much of the twentieth century as psychologists rejected introspection to focus instead on observable behaviours and the stimuli that caused them. Even in the 1970s and 1980s, as cognitive science became established, consciousness remained a controversial topic among scientists, who openly questioned whether it was a valid area of scientific investigation. Early in his career, molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Francis Crick wanted to study consciousness, but instead chose to work on the more tangible mysteries of DNA.

          Eventually, prominent scientists (including Crick) did decide to tackle consciousness, which ushered in a shift in thinking that surged in the 1990s, fuelled by the increasing availability of brain-scanning technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). At this point, scientists finally embarked on a major search for the mechanisms in the brain that are associated with the conscious processing of information.

          A succession of breakthroughs followed, including the case of a 23-year-old woman who sustained a severe brain injury in a car accident in July 2005, which left her in a non-responsive state, also known as wakeful unawareness. She could open her eyes and exhibited cycles of sleep and wakefulness, but did not respond to commands or show signs of voluntary movement. She was still unresponsive five months later. In a first-of-its-kind study, Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and now at Western University, and his colleagues observed the woman using fMRI while giving her a series of verbal commands1. When the team asked her to imagine playing tennis, they observed activity in a part of her brain called the supplementary motor area. When they asked her to imagine walking through her home, activity ramped up instead in three areas of the brain that are associated with movement and memory. The researchers observed the same patterns in healthy volunteers who were given identical instructions.

          © Copyright Original Source

          Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
          Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
          But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

          go with the flow the river knows . . .

          Frank

          I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

          Comment


          • Originally posted by seer View Post


            Searle is a smart guy - but his theory is still open to my previous objection.
            Even a strict monist would have to admit to a dualism of sorts, no? The chair that the monist is sitting in is obviously distinct from the thought about the chair. The difference would lie in the definition of substance. Searle proposed that the brain and these first person inner experiences were of the same substance, and are "causally reducible to the brain, without being ontologically reducible."

            I see what you're saying though. If these were indeed physical, we should be able to see them and map them out on the human brain. As you say, there should be a notable difference between the brains of creatures who have self awareness and those that don't. For that matter, there should be a difference between, say, the brain of a Christian and that of a Muslim.

            Tass keeps bringing up that there are tools that do just this. Is there some new technology out there that I am unaware of?

            Comment


            • From Shuny's post:

              When the team asked her to imagine playing tennis, they observed activity in a part of her brain called the supplementary motor area. When they asked her to imagine walking through her home, activity ramped up instead in three areas of the brain that are associated with movement and memory. The researchers observed the same patterns in healthy volunteers who were given identical instructions.


              Were they able to see any first person experience in the subject's brain? The color of the walls, for instance...maybe associated memories, etc.?

              Do you believe that this technology will continue to evolve until we actually can read the mind?

              Comment


              • Originally posted by Machinist View Post
                From Shuny's post:

                Were they able to see any first person experience in the subject's brain? The color of the walls, for instance...maybe associated memories, etc.?

                Do you believe that this technology will continue to evolve until we actually can read the mind?
                They can't see or know first person experience. We could never know the interior life of a bat for instance. No matter how many electrodes we connect to the brain.

                Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                Comment


                • Originally posted by Machinist View Post

                  Tass keeps bringing up that there are tools that do just this. Is there some new technology out there that I am unaware of?
                  No. How, even in principle, could one discover the image of my mother I'm now holding in my mind? You may discover which parts of my brain are causing said image - but science could never actually reproduce it.

                  Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                  Comment


                  • Originally posted by seer View Post

                    No. How, even in principle, could one discover the image of my mother I'm now holding in my mind? You may discover which parts of my brain are causing said image - but science could never actually reproduce it.
                    Reproducing the image would not be necessary. Establishing the origin and cause would be the goal of science in terms of the relationship of the brain to consciousness,
                    Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
                    Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                    But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

                    go with the flow the river knows . . .

                    Frank

                    I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

                    Comment


                    • Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post

                      Reproducing the image would not be necessary. Establishing the origin and cause would be the goal of science in terms of the relationship of the brain to consciousness,
                      But that is not the point. I have no doubt that science could know which part of my brain is producing the image. It is the image or thought that is beyond science to know. If I dwell on on my favorite food, science may well be able to know which part of my brain is active at that point - but can it then tell me which food that is? My favorite color? Car? These first person experiences are a black box.
                      Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                      Comment


                      • Originally posted by seer View Post

                        They can't see or know first person experience. We could never know the interior life of a bat for instance. No matter how many electrodes we connect to the brain.
                        First person? Yes they can dothe sameforbats as they do with humans. First person is not necessary to establish a direct cause and effect between the brain and thoughts and images in consciousness. They can establish the cause and effect between images and thoughts and the specific locations in the brain.the brain.

                        More references to follow . . .
                        Last edited by shunyadragon; 01-05-2022, 09:41 AM.
                        Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
                        Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                        But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

                        go with the flow the river knows . . .

                        Frank

                        I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post

                          They can establish the cause and effect between images and thoughts and the specific locations in the brain.the brain.

                          More references to follow . . .
                          I have no problem with that but that is not what we are speaking of.
                          Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                          Comment


                          • Source: https://www.kurzweilai.net/projecting-a-visual-image-directly-into-the-brain-bypassing-the-eyes



                            Projecting a visual image directly into the brain, bypassing the eyes

                            Allowing the blind to see or the paralyzed to feel touchJuly 14, 2017



                            Brain-wide activity in a zebrafish when it sees and tries to pursue prey (credit: Ehud Isacoff lab/UC Berkeley)

                            Imagine replacing a damaged eye with a window directly into the brain — one that communicates with the visual part of the cerebral cortex by reading from a million individual neurons and simultaneously stimulating 1,000 of them with single-cell accuracy, allowing someone to see again.

                            That’s the goal of a $21.6 million DARPA award to the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), one of six organizations funded by DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design program announced this week to develop implantable, biocompatible neural interfaces that can compensate for visual or hearing deficits.*

                            The UCB researchers ultimately hope to build a device for use in humans. But the researchers’ goal during the four-year funding period is more modest: to create a prototype to read and write to the brains of model organisms — allowing for neural activity and behavior to be monitored and controlled simultaneously. These organisms include zebrafish larvae, which are transparent, and mice, via a transparent window in the skull.


                            UC Berkeley | Brain activity as a zebrafish stalks its prey

                            “The ability to talk to the brain has the incredible potential to help compensate for neurological damage caused by degenerative diseases or injury,” said project leader Ehud Isacoff, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. “By encoding perceptions into the human cortex, you could allow the blind to see or the paralyzed to feel touch.”

                            How to read/write the brain

                            To communicate with the brain, the team will first insert a gene into neurons that makes fluorescent proteins, which flash when a cell fires an action potential. This will be accompanied by a second gene that makes a light-activated “optogenetic” protein, which stimulates neurons in response to a pulse of light.
                            Peering into a mouse brain with a light field microscope to capture live neural activity of hundreds of individual neurons in a 3D section of tissue at video speed (30 Hz) (credit: The Rockefeller University)

                            To read, the team is developing a miniaturized “light field microscope.”** Mounted on a small window in the skull, it peers through the surface of the brain to visualize up to a million neurons at a time at different depths and monitor their activity.***

                            This microscope is based on the revolutionary “light field camera,” which captures light through an array of lenses and reconstructs images computationally in any focus.
                            A holographic projection created by a spatial light modulator would illuminate (“write”) one set of neurons at one depth — those patterned by the letter a, for example — and simultaneously illuminate other sets of neurons at other depths (z level) or in regions of the visual cortex, such as neurons with b or c patterns. That creates three-dimensional holograms that can light up hundreds of thousands of neurons at multiple depths, just under the cortical surface. (credit: Valentina Emiliani/University of Paris, Descartes)

                            The combined read-write function will eventually be used to directly encode perceptions into the human cortex — inputting a visual scene to enable a blind person to see. The goal is to eventually enable physicians to monitor and activate thousands to millions of individual human neurons using light.

                            Isacoff, who specializes in using optogenetics to study the brain’s architecture, can already successfully read from thousands of neurons in the brain of a larval zebrafish, using a large microscope that peers through the transparent skin of an immobilized fish, and simultaneously write to a similar number.

                            The team will also develop computational methods that identify the brain activity patterns associated with different sensory experiences, hoping to learn the rules well enough to generate “synthetic percepts” — meaning visual images representing things being touched — by a person with a missing hand, for example.

                            The brain team includes ten UC Berkeley faculty and researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Paris, Descartes.

                            * In future articles, KurzweilAI will cover the other research projects announced by DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design program, which is part of the U.S. NIH Brain Initiative.

                            ** Light penetrates only the first few hundred microns of the surface of the brain’s cortex, which is the outer wrapping of the brain responsible for high-order mental functions, such as thinking and memory but also interpreting input from our senses. This thin outer layer nevertheless contains cell layers that represent visual and touch sensations.

                            © Copyright Original Source

                            Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
                            Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                            But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

                            go with the flow the river knows . . .

                            Frank

                            I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by seer View Post

                              I have no problem with that but that is not what we are speaking of.
                              Objective verifiable evidence of the direct relationship between the brain and consciousness.
                              Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
                              Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
                              But will they come when you do call for them? Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, Act III:

                              go with the flow the river knows . . .

                              Frank

                              I do not know, therefore everything is in pencil.

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by shunyadragon View Post

                                Objective verifiable evidence of the direct relationship between the brain and consciousness.
                                So? Can science see or know the first person experience of my mother's image? Of course not, it is beyond science. And if it is beyond science then it all can not be reduced to materialism.

                                Heck your religion takes it further:

                                The rational soul—the human spirit—did not descend into this body or subsist through it to begin with, that it should require some substance to depend upon after the constituent parts of the body have decomposed. On the contrary, the rational soul is the substance upon which the body depends. The rational soul is endowed from the beginning with individuality; it does not acquire it through the intermediary of the body. At most, what can be said is that the individuality and identity of the rational soul may be strengthened in this world, and that the soul may either progress and attain to the degrees of perfection or remain in the lowest abyss of ignorance and be veiled from and deprived of beholding the signs of God. – Some Answered Questions, newly revised edition, p. 277.
                                Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

                                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

                                Comment

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