>Consciousness is not identical to brain chemistry and neural states because it just isn't.
>But only in humans.

Why is this view so prevalent? Even by many intellectuals.

>>16693253 (OP)
>ESL midwit strawman: The thread

>>16693279

>Inherently causal things can build themselves into acausal superstructures because it makes me happy to believe this is the case.

>>16693253 (OP)
exceptional human theory
a lot of humans cannot handle being just animals that shit piss and fuck, hence religion, manifest destiny, etc.

>>16693253 (OP)
Personally I think animals have sovls.

>>16693308
why do you assume anything has a soul? we've never seen a soul, measured a soul, can't verify they're real...
what is more likely: animals have chemical computers in their heads, or they have a soul?

>>16693316
I didn't assume, it's just what I think. I can't prove it to you or anything.

>>16693253 (OP)
i don't think you understand the topic. what you said is meaningless. it's not the topic under discussion at all.

>>16693316
They can have both, its like smell, sure you have all the chemicals, but there is secondary emergent phenomenon to experience those chemicals directly, the sum total of all the qualities of a body in action is its soul.

>>16693253 (OP)
"But only humans" version of this isn't prevalent at all among intellectuals. People who make arguments along the line

>Consciousness is not identical to brain chemistry and neural states because it just isn't.

are usually willing to extend that to animals as well.

>>16693253 (OP)
I've never heard anyone make that point, except maybe Descartes, but he was genuinely autistic.
Consciousness is irreducible, but it's so for animals as well, not just us. Value your pets, bros, they're unique.

>>16694119
No, the midwits who make those kind of arguments tend to argue that animals don't have any higher cognitive functions like human consciousness and operate solely on some kind of inert instinct.

The brain is a quantum computing organ.

This is proven obviously true by the fact that photons are QM interacting with your optic nerves so you can read this.

>>16694124
Animals can be concious but not sapient (self aware) like when they fail the mirror test. Some animals pass the mirror test. Depends on species.

>>16694146

>quantum

That word doesn't mean what you think it does.

Animals have full consciousness.

>>16694146
>Some animals pass the mirror test.
Humans don't all pass the mirror test either.

>>16693253 (OP)
>>Consciousness is not identical to brain chemistry and neural states because it just isn't.
The actual argument is that we don't know if the brain is the source of conciousness, or if it's merely a transceiver or modulator. You can prove that certain regions of the brain affect conciousness, but whether they are the source or not is always going to be an assumption.

Consider this
>you're in a closed room with a light source and a switch
>the light is on, you can see the room
>you hit the switch
>it becomes dark, you can't see the room anymore
Was the switch the source of your vision, or did it merely affect your eye's capability to see?

>>16695868
It didn't do either, it affected the external light source, you can pull out your phone and use its light to verify.

>>16695911
>It didn't do either, it affected the external light source
Indirect effect is also an effect, Anon. Did the lack of an external light source affect your eyes? But what is even more important, we seem to be in an agreement that the switch wasn't the source of the image despite being correlated with it. Just like the brain isn't necessarily the source of conciousness.

>>16695923
>Indirect effect is also an effect
Yea and it didn't make your eye less capable of seeing you just need a new light source.

>we seem to be in an agreement that the switch wasn't the source of the image despite being correlated with it.
No, you are trying to conflate the source of light with the source of awareness of light, yes, you first need light to be aware of light, eyes are only the sensory organ, they don't create the light that is sensed.

>the brain isn't necessarily the source of conciousness.
No, its not because nobody things the eye is the source of light, everyone knows the eye just captures external light.

>>16695929
>Yea and it didn't make your eye less capable of seeing you just need a new light source.
Just like you could say brain death didn't stop your conciousness from existing, it just needs a new brain to be expressed by.
>eyes are only the sensory organ, they don't create the light that is sensed
And we can't prove the brain creates the conciousness it modulates.
>nobody things the eye is the source of light, everyone knows the eye just captures external light
We know that now thanks to better understanding of human anatomy. A few thousand years ago no one had any idea how eyes actually interacted with light. They just knew that no light = no vision.

>>16695868
>the brain is the source of conciousness
That's a false representation of physicalism like you closet dualists always tend to do. A physicalist doesn't claim that the brain produces consciousness because then you create a duality between the brain and the consciousness it produces. A true physicalist claims that the brain and consciousness are identical. The brain is conscious.

>it's merely a transceiver or modulator.
This claim is typically made by those who still believe in the aether and believe that the powers that be have conspired to ignore, ridicule and reject the thoughts of Nicola Tesla to keep the masses imprisoned in a materialist' system where they forever need to toil for resources that don't need to be scarce without ever realizing that they are in fact the monad, the figurative unified white light source that the evil material world divides like a prism.

Frankly: show me the aether or fuck off.

>>16695931
>Just like you could say brain death didn't stop your conciousness from existing, it just needs a new brain to be expressed by.
No, you can't say that until there have been successful brain implants where the body still remembers everything despite having a completely different brain.

>And we can't prove the brain creates the conciousness it modulates.
Then what other examples can you provide of consciousness without a brain?

>A few thousand years ago no one had any idea how eyes actually interacted with light.
I accept your concession, your argument is one of someone who has not been exposed to discoveries in human anatomy and has no idea how brains, eyes, or light works.

>>16695933
>No, you can't say that until there have been successful brain implants
No, that is not how logic works at all. I don't need to confirm something to consider it a possibility. You may reject that possibility, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
>Then what other examples can you provide of consciousness without a brain?
What examples of vision without light can you provide?
>your argument is one of someone who has not been exposed to discoveries in human anatomy and has no idea how brains, eyes, or light works.
Your argument is of one that has a current, grossly limited understanding of conciousness, that may be much better in the future.

>>16695932
>A true physicalist claims that the brain and consciousness are identical
Well then your "true physicalist" is silly as dead brains still physically exist yet the consciousness is nowhere to be found. What a stupid statement. Show me even one renowed neuroscientist who has claimed that the "brain and consciousness are identical".
>textbook strawman
k

>>16695934
>I don't need to confirm something to consider it a possibility.
You not only can't confirm it, you can't explain in any way how you could install a new brain and it would pick up all the memories of the body since those networks are stored in brains.
>What examples of vision without light can you provide?
Sonar/Echolocation.
>Your argument is of one that has a current, grossly limited understanding of conciousness,
Still a significantly better understanding than someone who doesn't even know the first thing about anatomy or light and actively refuses to accept modern discoveries.

>>16695935
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism

>>16695936
>you can't explain in any way how you could install a new brain and it would pick up all the memories
Maybe i will be when we actually progress enough to transplant a brain. That remains to be seen, but you reject it already, because reasons.
>those networks are stored in brains
We don't actually know if memories are stored in the brain. It's possible, perhaps even likely given our current state of knowledge, but we only know that destroying specific parts of it may also destroy the capability to process them, or that stimulating certain parts of the brain may make one relieve them. Nice correlation, but still just that.
>Sonar/Echolocation.
You can read a sonar with no display involving light? Cool.
>Still a significantly better understanding than someone who doesn't even know the first thing about anatomy or light
Relative. Our understanding of conciousness is still limited, and may be considered caveman tier in a few thousand or even hundred years.
>actively refuses to accept modern discoveries
I don't refuse any discoveries, i merely refuse to say that a correlation must equal causation. Something you evidently struggle with, just like with the concept of our current models being possibly flawed, just like all the models before them.

>>16695935
>Well then your "true physicalist" is silly as dead brains still physically exist yet the consciousness is nowhere to be found. What a stupid statement.
A dead brain is less of a brain than a living brain therefore if brain = consciousness then you expect less consciousness of a dead brain than from a living brain.

>>16695945
>a philosophical thesis by a philosopher says something therefore true
Sir this is /sci/.
>>16695948
>less consciousness of a dead brain
You just admitted to a dualism there. If they're indentical then where is the dead conciousness? I can clearly see the dead brain.

>>16695946
>Maybe i will be when we actually progress enough to transplant a brain.
Brains have been transplanted, but it wasn't as you described, putting a new brain in an old body is not at all like putting a new light bulb in an old socket, the brain has to relearn everything about the body as new connections form, it doesn't just turn on when you install it like a light switch.

>We don't actually know if memories are stored in the brain
We do, we can watch them being accessed in real time under MRI.
>or that stimulating certain parts of the brain may make one relieve them
No we can show people objects and see the same parts of the brain light up as memories of that object activate.

>Nice correlation
Yes it is significantly more evidence that your claim that you can just swap your brain with that of a gorilla and your body will instantly switch back on and remember everything.

>You can read a sonar with no display involving light?
Yes, it is very cool and helpful beeps and boops can get translated into maps by machines without any light involved, its how most of the seafloor was visualized and mapped since light is scarce down there and its how modems turn noise into digital images.

>Our understanding of conciousness is still limited
But not nearly as limited as the literal caveman understanding that you are arguing for.

>I don't refuse any discoveries
You do

>just like with the concept of our current models being possibly flawed
Of course its flawed, but that doesn't mean we should revert to some older more retarded model we know is flawed due to modern discoveries.

>>16695951
>Sir this is /sci/.
Again a false representation of my claim. My claim is not that physicalism is true. My claim is that brain = consciousness is the only position that can be called physicalism.

>>16695951
>You just admitted to a dualism there.
No.
>If they're indentical then where is the dead conciousness? I can clearly see the dead brain.
You're confused because you consider consciousness as a separate thing from anything else you observe. Here's an alternative viewpoint: consciousness is what it's like to be a brain. There's also what it's like to be a rock but since rocks are structured in a different way than brains such that rocks probably don't see, hear, smell, taste or feel a brain can't comprehend what it's like to be a rock.

>>16693253 (OP)
This is why evolution by natural selection is so catastrophic to many human delusions of grandeur like religions, souls, platonism, etc.

>>16695956
>My claim is that brain = consciousness is the only position that can be called physicalism.
No physics can still have emergent non-physical abstraction that are still completely grounded in real physical objectivity like how position over time leads to speed, so maybe brain activity over time leads to consciousness.

>>16695966
Obviously there is no consciousness without movement. As long as the brain is alive it is measuring differences. Every phenomenon emerging from physics is a physical phenomenon.

Now think carefully: speed is not a different abstraction from position. Everything is always moving. A car moves between one tree to another tree but just the observation of that one tree was already a movement. The tree is not a static object but changing all the time at a pace to slow to measure as a noticeable difference between parts of the moment you observe it. Furthermore there is distance between you and the tree and there are differences between what is observed now and the memory of the observation. All we do is measure differences all the time, which is movement, but we only start calling these differences movement when they're noticeable as such.

Now is an idea, a thought, an abstraction different form an object? Abstractions are part of what you experience, something you observe like everything else. No you say I see a person walking and I imagine the person has all sorts of ideas in his head that do exist but I can't observe. That's like saying I can't know what it's like to be other than I am even though I know others exist.

Yet there are patterns you say. Things are not just moving but behaving in specific ways. Laws of physics seem to exist but not as a material object, how can that be? Such a question goes beyond the scope of the mind-body problem.

>>16693253 (OP)
I'm letting animals die even thou I think they're conscious, they are just entities at wrong time at wrong phase, and also why killing more plants when you can kill less if you eat animals.

>>16695988
>Obviously there is no consciousness without movement.
And there is no movement without abstract past and future states.

>speed is not a different abstraction from position
It is because time becomes involved and that is an abstraction unto itself.

>Now is an idea, a thought, an abstraction different form an object?
Yes which is why speed is different from location and they can't be measured at the same time.

>>16693253 (OP)
you've already started from the premise that some non-human species have consciousness which I'm not sure is prevalent, we're still debating if all humans even have consciousness

>>16696018
>And there is no movement without abstract past and future states.
That's a chicken-and-egg-problem: abstract past and future states are either the cause or the result of a discerning physical system. Either way to experience past, present and future is what it's like to be a brain or perhaps even an AI.

>It is because time becomes involved and that is an abstraction unto itself.
To clarify: no thing has a fixed location. Every thing has a speed relative to every other thing. Time is a non-physical phenomenon therefore consciousness is a non-physical phenomenon is a non sequitur so I don't see your point.

>Yes which is why speed is different from location and they can't be measured at the same time.
Both are the result of what it's like to be a physical system measuring other physical systems which requires some kind of notion of time but not consciousness as something else than what it's like to be a physical system measuring other physical systems.

>>16693253 (OP)
>>16694119
The MF book is called "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" precisely because it assumes that animals have consciousness

>>16696133
That wasn't a book. It was a paper. I read it multiple times and find his argument weak. His definition of consciousness, if you can even call it a definition, is such circular trite that I don't know how he didn't get torn to shreds immediately. Oh, wait, I know. Philosophers are circlejerking pseuds

>>16693253 (OP)
>found the soul
>it's a 4D twistor, lol
>Penrose and Hameroff were mostly right
https://iceni.substack.com/p/noetarchia-suprema-a-manifesto-that

NPCs dont have consciousness

the brain is of the central nervous system. are you aware of what nerves do for the body? they control the body. Nerves are what move your muscles and tendons, amongst protected background operations of your organs. the brain, therefore, is for controlling the body.
consciousness, the existential soul, is something ethereally different, and I only use the word "ethereally" here to describe a vague sense of invisible or otherwise undiscovered or non-physically bound affects. I would wager it is reasonable that a body and lifetime with the body enables a soul and consciousness to claim an affect of identity, that even in passing, even after the body, the mind still validates identity from the body lifetime.

that's all.

>>16693253 (OP)
Brain chemistry?!? Neural states?!?
Let's put it down to what it really is...
Everything has consciousness, but it is not self-aware of its own existence, the majority of all life is not even intelligent enough to even have or share what it is but a glimpse of a thought and the understanding of such, we are speaking of matter itself, to me, even a rock has consciousness, even a rock is alive.
It is not about consciousness existing or not, for that even dust and nothing dare to exist upon this realm, but the intelligence of such beings and such things, and the reality that has been imposed upon them and what they can do about it.

>>16699530
Ps.
I recognised I wrote "everything has a consciousness" and " even a rock has consciousness" when I wanted to write soul...
Sorry...tee-hee...

>>16695936
>You not only can't confirm it, you can't explain in any way how you could install a new brain and it would pick up all the memories of the body since those networks are stored in brains.
What the fuck is this argument, what has the body's memory to do with consciousness, so paraplegic people are not conscious ? whether or not the body accepts the new consciousness of the brain is a separate discussion.

>>16693253 (OP)
You don't have experiences because you are not alive to have them.

>>16693253 (OP)
The notion of "brain chemistry" and "neural states" is in the consciousness. So is the various categories that separate the two concepts, along with everything you know about the world, yourself, EVERYTHING.

You cannot escape the primacy of the consciousness.

Consciousness is the only thing that cannot be an illusion in the human experience.
Everything else has the potential to be illusory.

This gives it an irreducible primacy over everything else.

>>16699634
>Everything else has the potential to be illusory.
Even consciousness can be illusion, certainly the notion of consciousness that is familiar to most people is absolutely an illusion. Further most other ideas about consciousness is also easily discountable. The reductiveness of consciousness is underestimated a lot. You can take away a lot of what people call "consciousness" leaving something foreign in place

>>16694124
You're confusing different things. Higher cognitive functions aren't the same thing as subjective experience.

>>16693290
Why does mud getting zapped by lightning make dinosaurs that have consciousness that has a hard problem?

>>16693253 (OP)
Conciousness is the waveform that our brain has the ability to store and reinduce. People wake up the same from a coma because the waveform cymatics have been stored through previous tuning of our biochemistry like a moldable Chladni plate that stores the nodes at which points the resonance was held aka what blend of hormones and nerve signals happened in relation to eachother that ended in the storage of a waveform memory. People often overhype conciousness and underemphasize the importance of recollection and crossreference.
Conciousness is the Odinself, recollection is Muninn and crossreference is Huginn. Odin most fears the loss of Muninn because without him Huginn is an irrelevant hallucinator.

>>16693253 (OP)
Gods image brah

religion

>>16693279
fpbp

differentiate us from nature and we feel alone

>>16699666
It is when they try to claim that animals don't have subjective experience such as the feeling of pain because they lack the cognitive functions necessary to feel such things because something something human souls, so that is why it is okay for humans to torture and dominate animals.

>>16699572
>so paraplegic people are not conscious
What the fuck are you talking about?
Paraplegic people have memories, they remember their own childhood, the one associated with the head/brain that experienced it, not the childhood of the spinal bones or whatever that may have been implanted in them to fix their paraplegia.

>>16699634
>Consciousness is the only thing that cannot be an illusion in the human experience
Can't it tho?

>>16699634
>Consciousness is the only thing that cannot be an illusion in the human experience.
>t. non-dreamer

>>16696095
>Either way to experience past, present and future is what it's like to be a brain or perhaps even an AI.
No, that is what it means to be alive at all, you can't have experience without all three states, past, present, and future.

>To clarify: no thing has a fixed location.
Which is why consciousness is necessary to track the changes over time.

>Time is a non-physical phenomenon
No, time is the physical phenomenon of motion, physical motion is the same thing as time.

>therefore consciousness is a non-physical phenomenon is a non sequitur so I don't see your point.
The point you don't seem to understand is that physical concrete phenomenon have secondary emergent, but still physical, abstractions like time and consciousness that arise as a result of physical interactions. Measuring something's position, then measuring it again after a second to determine its speed didn't create some non-physical phenomenon called speed, it just compares two physical states as a new metric that combines the two known physical states.

>not consciousness as something else than what it's like to be a physical system measuring other physical systems.
That is exactly what consciousness is, a physical body that can observe other physicals bodies and compare them to itself while contextualizing the two as part of a greater unified system.

>>16693316
you don't have a soul because you're an autistic robot.

>>16705740
Autism refutes dualism. Higher conscious activity and sensory input leads to fragmented perception and mechanic/physicalist thinking as opposed to the more autopilot neurotypical brains of people who tend to have dualist views. You'd expect the opposite: the more conscious autist brain would have a stronger sense of oneness in its consciousness and more spiritual/dualist views among autists.

>>16693253 (OP)
Our minds are not as amazing as we might want to believe. Our thoughts are simply restructured sensory information, based on what we’ve experienced and memorized.

>>16693253 (OP)
It's trivial that it isn't. Is the software running on your computer, your computer? Obviously not. That wouldn't change even if we are talking about a specialized computer that runs certain software that only runs on that specialized computer and cannot be replicated without that particular substrate on some other hardware. We don't need to be hypothetical here, we have actual electronic hardware in real life that cannot be accurately emulated due to hardware quirks even if you emulate every gate perfectly.
Even if mind can only run in a brain, it's still not the same as it. To me it's so obvious I can never understand people struggling with such a straightforward concept.

>>16693316
the soul is the form of the body. it's the configuration of your matter such that you are what you are and can do what you do. no Cartesian dualism needed. read Aristotle.

Honestly, people cling to the idea that consciousness isn’t just brain stuff and only humans have it because it feels that way. Like, the “experience” part doesn’t seem explainable by neurons firing, so intuition wins.

Plus, old-school philosophy and religion drilled the mind/body split deep into us. Science still can’t fully say how feelings arise from brain activity — that “hard problem” is a beast.

Also, we’re naturally biased to think our consciousness is special. It’s tough to imagine animals or AI having the same “inside experience.”

But nowadays, most scientists agree consciousness does come from brain processes, and animals likely have it too. It’s just a super tricky problem that messes with intuition.

>>16705740
>I became an imaginary demon's slave and will kiss the feet of anyone who wears the costume because my ego is too fragile to be called mean names like autistic.

>>16705905
>Is the software running on your computer, your computer?
It is the stuff being computed just like the formulas you enter into a calculator isn't the calculator, but the work for the calculator, either way without computations or calculations to process, the device is functionless, so there is no computer without something to compute, its just a paperweight.

>>16693253 (OP)
>muh materialism worldview
>>>/r*ddit/

>>16693316
The word is ‘Metaphysics’. Enjoy your new Google adventure