I have bad news: consciousness resides in the brain.

[Anonymous No.8393385]

How can one ever possibly feel calm and collected once one knows that this is the case? Help me orient myself with regard to bleak materialism.

[Anonymous No.8393389]

>Consciousness "resides" in the brain

[citation needed]

[Anonymous No.8393390]

>>8393385

But the brain resides within God, so it's ok

[Anonymous No.8393396]

>>8393389
go watch a nsfw rekt thread and look at some dying people and tell me at what point do their souls go up to jesus or what else happens when your body has been literally eviscerated

[Anonymous No.8393419]

>Consciousness resides in the brain

Nice extreme views, sir. *Tips fedora in your direction* would you like to go to a richard dawkins seminar with me on the 'morrow and perhaps have sex with my wife?

[Anonymous No.8393423]

>>8393385
Enjoy the moment, anon.
The conscious you is just a result of millions of years of evolution. Use it, fulfill your dreams and live a life you want to. Because after your brain dies, there's no more "you".

[Anonymous No.8393432]

>>8393385
>consciousness resides in the brain

in what way is this either news or controversial?

are there really people who think otherwise? if so where does consciousness reside? in one's intestines?

[Anonymous No.8393433]

>>8393385
I am convinced that everything is conscious. I wrote a philosophy based mostly on the dichotomy between consciousness and whatever else exists, and in the end I don't think there actually is anything else.

This isn't to say that I think trees have emotions or something like that, but rather that consciousness, and specifically meaning, as in the experience of meaning, are universal qualities of reality, are actually the substance of reality itself.

[Anonymous No.8393472]

>>8393432
Maybe you should actually read some literature on the hard problem of consciousness before you open your mouth on the topic.

[Anonymous No.8393480]

>>8393389
>>8393419
>>8393472

Retards that with nothing to dispute with. Also terrified of death of the consciousness.

[Anonymous No.8393488]

>the universe dies with you

[Anonymous No.8393493]

>>8393385
>humans only have one brain
this is not /sci/ and i do not think /sci/ has an amateur day if it was.

[Anonymous No.8393509]

Poor OP got baited by fancy fMRI neuro-imaging.
The question is: Can he recuperate?

Let's find out.

>consciousness resides in the brain

Great. For this to be true, you only have to open a human cranium, stick your hand into the soggy brain matter and pull out an object you call "consciousness".

[Anonymous No.8393513]

The mind and the body are united to make a complete human. This has been known since the days of the Church Fathers. None of this is news.

If anything, it's dualism that was the radical innovation, and I'm happy to see it and that fag Descartes BTFO.

[Anonymous No.8393525]

>>8393509
Ever heard of 'emergence', pleb?

[Anonymous No.8393530]

not /lit/

[Anonymous No.8393540]

>>8393472
so basically you can't answer my questions

where do you think consciousness resides if not in your brain?
actually in your case i'm prepared to believe that your brain doesn't harbour much in the way of anything

[Anonymous No.8393542]

>>8393525
That fashionable, semantically void buzzword coined by irrelevant analytic philosophers? Whoa!!! That sure explains it!!! :^)))))))

[Anonymous No.8393546]

>>8393542
Ugh. Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain - it does not exist in itself, but is a result of different sections of brain interacting with each other.

[Anonymous No.8393576]

>>8393385
What does it change for me?

[Anonymous No.8393588]

>>8393540
burnt

[Anonymous No.8393589]

>>8393488
The experience of the universe dies with you.

[Anonymous No.8393599]

>Implying FMRI's haven't been debunked and aren't completely useless

[Anonymous No.8393601]

>>8393390
So god is a skull?

[Anonymous No.8393602]

>>8393546
Yeah this.
>>8393513
Mind and body are one, newfag

[Anonymous No.8393606]

>>8393546
Whoa!!! Just look at how his "Ugh"--much like a bacon of light--tries to let us, the uneducated, know that whatever follows it is, without a shadow of doubt, the universal consensus, and you'd be an idiot to believe otherwise.

>Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain
>it does not exist in itself, but is a result of different sections of brain interacting with each other.
My sides. And the different sections of my computer, my digestive system, and the Andromeda galaxy interacting means that those interactions are a "consciousness" which is an "emergent property".

>Consciousness is an emergent property of the brain - it does not exist in itself
>Postulate existence of something
>Deny said existence

Okay, you obviously are not qualified to speak on the subject.

[Anonymous No.8393619]

Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, on materialism:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours ....

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

....

Take first the more obvious case of materialism. As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman's argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as, for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love or fear upon the sea. The earth is so very large, and the cosmos is so very small. The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

[Anonymous No.8393620]

Why would a basic fact like that cause you any distress? There's nothing "bleak" about your consciousness not being some permanent immortal bullshit.

[Anonymous No.8393623]

>>8393619

....

t is amusing to notice that many of the moderns, whether sceptics or mystics, have taken as their sign a certain eastern symbol, which is the very symbol of this ultimate nullity. When they wish to represent eternity, they represent it by a serpent with his tail in his mouth. There is a startling sarcasm in the image of that very unsatisfactory meal. The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

....

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name.

[Anonymous No.8393645]

consciousness is not how it is achieved

[Anonymous No.8393649]

>>8393606
Are you being obtuse on purpose?

[Anonymous No.8393652]

>>8393619
Ah, Chesterton. Such beautiful loquacious bullshit. "I have no actual argument against materialism, but it feels wrong and is therefore insane, limited, and leaves out all the important stuff like these examples that it in no way actually leaves out. Whoops. Better make more gently condescending remarks about the poor blind atheists."

I actually love reading Chesterton, but at the end of the day his arguments are idiotic, undeservedly smug, and involve nothing much beyond condescension towards any non-Xtians. If you want to know how much logic and likelihood means to Chesterton, just read "The Secret Garden," one of his better-known and respected Father Brown stories, and consider the idiotic amount of chance and deus ex machina required for the plan to come off. He makes Lewis look fair and open-minded when it comes to faith, for goodness' sake.

[Anonymous No.8393661]

>>8393652

Yeah I pretty much agree with you. But if your materialism is big enough to embrace some mysticism, it's not much of materialism.

As for the Fr. Brown stories, I have read that very one, among others, and agree with you there, too. Chesterton didn't take his own Fr. Brown stories very seriously, they were mostly for fun.

To me, someone who has never liked philosophy much, to say "everything is materially caused and there is nothing outside of matter, but the human mind is an extraordinary epiphenomenon and we can allow for poetry and all of that", and "there is something in ourselves that is non-material, a soul".

[Anonymous No.8393674]

>>8393661

And Chesterton is definitely an antidote against the kind of garden-variety morons who say things like

>the purpose of life is to reproduce

Or

>It doesn't matter what you do, we're all gonna die, I'm going to <x> and <x> and <x> and <x>!

Or

>I don't believe I can know anything

[Anonymous No.8393685]

>>8393649
Obtuse? Do you not know how the burden of proof works? It's simple: if you ontologically commit to x and somebody calls you out x, it is your duty to justify your position on x. You have yet to provide any evidence to your magical, >>>/x/-tier bollocks.

You claim to profess knowledge on the subject matter yet you flounder like a slippery eel, unable to define "consciousness" without running into semantic absurdities.

[Anonymous No.8393704]

>>8393685
I'm not the guy you were arguing with, but I find it ludicrous that you say things like, "Grab consciousness out of someone's brain. You can't? Musn't reside there then," and then have the gall to say other people are engaging in magical thinking.

[Anonymous No.8393712]

>>8393433
So you rewrote Schopenhauer's metaphysics?

[Anonymous No.8393721]

>>8393704
>Musn't reside there then," and then have the gall to say other people are engaging in magical thinking.
If finding something "ludicrous" would become the golden standard of a good argument we'd be in trouble.

At any rate, you're wrong. You're secretly assuming that I am arguing for a non-physical soul residing God knows where, which just isn't the case.

[Anonymous No.8393732]

Define "consciousness".

[Anonymous No.8393747]

>>8393732

The fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.

[Anonymous No.8393751]

>>8393747
you posted the wrong piece of anatomy then

[Anonymous No.8393755]

>>8393747
not the one u replied to, but don't animals also have that? i thought it's what made us diff from animals? or is it the ability to think rationally? i'm confused please make me understand

[Anonymous No.8393759]

>>8393747
What is "awareness"? Is an atom aware of other atoms because it changes in response to them?

[Anonymous No.8393775]

>>8393509
What you say is not impossible. Here's how we got our knowledge of the brain (since it was immoral to conduct experiments ) :

You get a patient. Patient can't perform X function. Autopsy. Patient has damaged X' structure.
Therefore X' corresponds to X.

You might think that this is too simple or stupid, but that's how they did it. And now we know that the cortex is the conscious part of the brain and the subcortex is the subconscious one.
I've studied this shit and can go deeper if you have questions.

[Anonymous No.8393777]

>>8393759
What is an AI?

[Anonymous No.8393808]

>>8393755

We're just a shitload more intelligent than animals. and we have language.

>>8393759

Knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.

[Anonymous No.8393830]

>>8393808
>Knowledge or perception of a situation or fact.
That definition has literally nothing to do with the OP.

[Anonymous No.8393836]

>>8393830

How so?

[Anonymous No.8393837]

>>8393836
Because the OP uses it as an object and not a property.

[Anonymous No.8393840]

>>8393837

Are you talking about >>8393385 or >>8393759

[Anonymous No.8393841]

>>8393674
instead of having them read chesterton, you can just shoot them in the head

it's quicker, and not as painful for them

[Anonymous No.8393842]

>>8393759
You need to be a billionaire as far as neurons go in order to be conscious. An atom is not aware because it changes. I am not aware because I change. I am aware because
>something touches me
>touch is converted to electricity (action potential)
>electricity goes to brain
>brain knows body is touched

The same shit for vision, hearing, smell and taste

[Anonymous No.8393843]

>>8393808
>We're just a shitload more intelligent than animals. and we have language.
Parrots can talk and some of them are as smart as small children. You can even teach primates sign language and they'll lie to you.

[Anonymous No.8393847]

>>8393843
Still. They aren't smarter than us. That guy is saying animals are dumber than people. He isn't saying that they are unconscious. What is your point?

[Anonymous No.8393851]

>>8393843
>>8393847

They can reproduce the sounds but they can't "talk". You can train dogs to sit when you tell them to but that doesn't mean they understand language.

[Anonymous No.8393853]

>>8393606
>bacon of light

[Anonymous No.8393856]

>>8393389
Free Will by Sam Harris, lots of research mentioned there

[Anonymous No.8393860]

>>8393856
>Sam Harris

[Anonymous No.8393862]

>>8393842
>>brain knows body is touched
It's time to consult and revisit the mereological fallacy, a fallacy committed by hack neuroscientists worldwide.

[Anonymous No.8393864]

Okay here's something simpler: you are an irrational spiritualist monkey if you believe this image.

[Anonymous No.8393865]

>>8393851
They can talk, they can even lie as I pointed out in the case of primates. Humans have gotten snowed by animals they taught language to who then used it against humans.
>>8393847
>Still. They aren't smarter than us.
They're smarter than some of us, including scientists.

[Anonymous No.8393878]

>>8393865

[Anonymous No.8393881]

>>8393864
>ur irrational
>becuz ur monkey

[Anonymous No.8393906]

There are only two modes of answering this question at this point.

Either you side with the epiphenomenalist camp, or the panpsychist camp.

I side with the panpsychist camp personally.

[Anonymous No.8393911]

>>8393712
Haven't really read Schopenhauer so that is possible. You're saying he had a similar system?

[Anonymous No.8393914]

>>8393906
F A L S E D I L E M M A.

[Anonymous No.8393919]

>>8393914
Not really a false dilemma if you're actually up to speed on the discussion.

[Anonymous No.8393936]

>>8393906
So you can believe a claim that is literally a paradox, or believe a claim that proposes there are things we still don't know about?

[Anonymous No.8393940]

Do you think in your head because that's where your eyes are or because that's where your brain is??

[Anonymous No.8393942]

>>8393940
Neither. You think in your ears.

[Anonymous No.8393944]

>>8393940

You think in your heart, as all the ancients knew.

Have you ever seen someone with a brain injury? I have, they can still think, though their thoughts may be damaged or altered.

Have you ever seen someone with a heart injury? No, because their thoughts go away, and they are dead.

When you are emotionally aroused do you feel it in your brain?

No, idiot, you feel it in your breast.

[Anonymous No.8393948]

>>8393712
Judging by the beginning of his World as will and idea I've pdfed here I don't think it is the same. He is making some kind of subject-object dichotomy. Does he later collapse it into a homogeneous reality?

[Anonymous No.8393952]

>>8393936
Not sure what you mean about this post.

Can you elaborate? What do you mean about a "paradox"?

[Anonymous No.8393956]

>>8393944

wow

[Anonymous No.8393961]

>>8393944
Are you perchance someone with a brain injury?

[Anonymous No.8393964]

>>8393944
>Have you ever seen someone with a heart injury? No, because their thoughts go away, and they are dead.
I like the point but plenty of people do have heart attacks and similar and are not cold and dead.

[Anonymous No.8393978]

>>8393775
You're oversimplifying tho. It's generally easier (as in more right) to say behaviour x' is caused by change in area x. But change in area x doesn't necessarilly entail behaviour x'.

[Anonymous No.8393991]

>The defining aspect of human perception is that they see being as something that is singular in nature
>The most common view of being involves it being unique to each person
???

[Anonymous No.8393996]

>>8393385

You can't account for the structural characteristics of language, though. So who cares.

[Anonymous No.8393999]

>>8393991

We're all humans but we're not the same human.

[Anonymous No.8394007]

>>8393712
>>8393948
Koch (of Crick and Koch buddy neuroscientist fame) has a similar conception btw.

As for subject-object dichotomy, he's responding to Kant. Kant you may be aware had this idea of the thing in itself that sends out these phenomena that become sense perceptions and we transform it through imagination into the world around us. To put it in very broad terms, Schopenhauer thinks we do have access to the thing in itself because we are thing in itself. So there is no real subject object dichotomy, we are all one and same.

[Anonymous No.8394014]

>>8393999
The latter view is a paradox because it implies some information cannot be communicated.

[Anonymous No.8394016]

>>8393864
The sad part is, we all know that everyone would use these, even knowing the risks.

That said, of course you don't die. We're already dead.

[Anonymous No.8394018]

>>8394014
Private language argument m8. Some stuff can't be communicated.

[Anonymous No.8394020]

>>8394007
>. Kant you may be aware had this idea of the thing in itself that sends out these phenomena that become sense perceptions and we transform it through imagination into the world around us
Yeah this always bothered me about Kant, though I've always found his writing extremely soothing for some reason, something to do with the absolutely precise and calm nature of it I think.


As for Schopenhauer, he mentions that you have to read his entire book at least twice to understand what he's saying. So he must be saying something much more sophisticated than what i'm thinking of which is expressible in like two sentences.

Would you mind telling me what his definition of 'will' is in contrast to the 'idea', I would read it myself but he is taking an unearthly amount of time to get to actually saying anything

[Anonymous No.8394022]

>>8393385
That isn't bad news, m8. It's just another piece of evidence supporting determinism, so nothing new.

>>8393390
This.

[Anonymous No.8394025]

>>8394014

I don't see how it does but even then language has limitations.

[Anonymous No.8394034]

>>8394018
>>8394025
In a physical sense, like the transfer of heat. The implication that there exist properties that cannot be measured.

[Anonymous No.8394051]

>>8394020
>Would you mind telling me what his definition of 'will' is in contrast to the 'idea', I would read it myself but he is taking an unearthly amount of time to get to actually saying anything
World as Will is what I've just described above, reality is a Will that we and everything else are aspects of. Ideas are to do with how we see the world and how come we perceive ourselves as separate to a rock or a tree from the ground etc etc which is the world as respresentation. You could also say Will is more to do with active drive and Idea is passive interpretation or something to that effect.

You should read the book since this is all gross oversimplification. I believe you'll find it helpful in reading tho.

[Anonymous No.8394058]

>>8394034

Are you saying information isn't physical?

[Anonymous No.8394065]

>>8394058
No, I'm saying that the common perception of the mind implies that minds cannot be measured.

[Anonymous No.8394084]

>>8394051
>World as Will is what I've just described above, reality is a Will that we and everything else are aspects of. Ideas are to do with how we see the world and how come we perceive ourselves as separate to a rock or a tree from the ground etc etc which is the world as respresentation
Actually yes I think I would read the book, that is very close to what I came to think like. I understood it less like 'reflection' and more that our conscious selves were like little strands of the 'will', that have been separated, but that can merge with it in various ways. Which is the same idea really as the reflection thing, it is like you interpret reality as these different forms because you are this localized segment of it which colors your possible perception of it.

Like if you had a huge stream that was initially all together and then it started separating into different paths which merge with each other in complex ways.

I'll have to set aside some time to read it I suppose, it's going to take forever with the way he writes.

[Anonymous No.8394106]

>>8394065

Depends on what you mean by measuring. Technically it's possible to record brain activity then reproduce it in another person's brain.

[Anonymous No.8394136]

>>8394106
>Technically it's possible to record brain activity then reproduce it in another person's brain.
Our brains are not consistent like some protostomes Michio Kaku. We all have very plastic neurons.

[Anonymous No.8394159]

>>8394136

Then how come brain scans are consistent for most people? If that were the case to such a degree surely the entire field of neuroscience would go bust.

[Anonymous No.8394164]

>>8394159
holy shit

[Anonymous No.8394179]

>>8394159
They're pretty consistent for individuals. But even where they're fairly consistent across a group of people (that they're not is the basis of most research so no it does the opposite of of going bust) that doesn't then mean you can tickle the neurons so that person A feels exactly like person B. On a neuron level the brains would be way too different.

[Anonymous No.8394187]

>>8393433
Your last comma should have been a semi colon.

[Anonymous No.8394258]

>>8394084
The point is that the will is uniform throughout everything, but that a human's senses only measure it within a limited space i.e. their own body. It's a solution for the problem of other minds that uses a more primal term.

[Anonymous No.8395018]

>>8393389
Literally this.

Also if you sickly bunch knew anything about the procedure and criteria of science, we wouldn't get this place clogged up with realists.
Nobody has proven consciousness to be anything within the scientific community.

[Anonymous No.8395189]

>>8393480
Humanity literally knows next to nothing about consciousness.

[Anonymous No.8395205]

>>8393540
>where do you think consciousness resides if not in your brain?

Without hoping to sound like I've had 5 tabs of acid, in all seriousness, what if consciousness exists all around us? What if the substance that causes us to be conscious returns to a larger consciousness separate from our bodies when we die?

No one knows anything about how consciousness comes about, thee possibilities are myriad and it has confused both philosophers and neuroscientists for a long time.

[Anonymous No.8395206]

>>8395189
Humanity knows quite a lot. There are plausible models in neuroscience since at least 1970s. It is you who are ignorant.

[Anonymous No.8395212]

>>8395206
No, I'm really not. It is you who are ignorant if you think that.

There are MODELS. But they're full of shit, and neuroscientists admit all the time that they are completely unsure how it works.

Interaction between physical parts of the brain doesn't explain how the substance of consciousness emerges in any intuitive or rational way.

[Anonymous No.8395218]

>>8393808
>We're just a shitload more intelligent than animals. and we have language.
>more intelligent

Only by certain subjective measures (tool use, some aspects of language).

[Anonymous No.8395248]

>>8393385
>2016
>we can literally predict people's decisions and control their behavior stimulating parts of their brains
>still believing in free will

[Anonymous No.8395383]

>>8393619
where is this from?

[Anonymous No.8395387]

practice meditation and stop thinking you know anything about how the mind works

[Anonymous No.8395404]

>>8395248
source?

[Anonymous No.8395410]

>>8393390
berkeley post best post m8

[Anonymous No.8395418]

>>8395387
I don't know what you think you've seen, but just practicing meditation isn't any guarantee of getting anywhere.

[Anonymous No.8395458]

>>8393606
>Whoa!!! Just look at how his "Ugh"--much like a bacon of light--tries to let us, the uneducated, know that whatever follows it is, without a shadow of doubt, the universal consensus, and you'd be an idiot to believe otherwise.

[Anonymous No.8395575]

>>8393601
Yes

[Anonymous No.8395585]

We are probably just the deranged dream of a Boltzmann Brain, which, by the way, forms with higher statistic probability than a Universe. Assuming Quantum fluctuations are real and not part of the dream.