Thought experiments on consciousness

[Anonymous No.6033914]

Assuming consciousness is an emergent property of the brain: If a small creature were to get in there like an ant, and started biting at your grey matter, altering your neurons, does the ant become part of your consciousness?

[Anonymous No.6033934]

Just altering the physical matter of the brain isn't enough to alter consciousness. People get their corpus callosum severed and can still function effectively.

The brain is engineered to an unapproachable level of resiliency and redundancy and consciousness is not dependent on any mere physical part ot processes.

[Anonymous No.6033951]

>>6033934
Sever the corpus callosum and what you get is a subject unable to report verbally what they see with their right eye and unable to recognize faces with their left eye.

[Anonymous No.6033955]

>>6033951
But they can still function and retain consciousness, is the point. Try cutting the centre of your computer CPU in half and see what happens.

[Anonymous No.6033963]

>>6033955
They're not completely cut off, they still share information via the thalamus, etc.

[Anonymous No.6033971]

>does the ant become part of your consciousness?

[Anonymous No.6033981]

>>6033914
that pic is pretty bitter and hyperbolic.

[Anonymous No.6033982]

>>6033934
>The brain is engineered
>engineered
>implying intentionality

[Anonymous No.6034004]

>>6033971
According to materialists, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon so technically, shouldn't an ant shifting neurons around be part of it?

[Anonymous No.6034072]

>intentionality
I learned a new word.
It must be the opposite of accidentality.

[Anonymous No.6034811]

Each of us has our own *perspective* of reality, our own inner world. Consciousness may be an 'illusion' running on the brain, but these illusions are running in parallel and are quantifiable because each one is distinct. Right now, over 7 billion illusions are running and that's only counting human brains.

Now, when our brains die, or 'break down', consciousness is lost. But...our *perspective* isn't. As I've typed this, thousands people have died, their brains have stopped working, but from my perspective I'm still conscious.

So here's where it gets interesting, and a bit ridiculous. Taking every conscious 'moment', no matter how messy and mechanical, for every perspective we can trace a line over time - including every moment of oblivion. Anesthesia, deep sleep, etc. and death. And that's the funny thing. From the point of death, oblivion becomes the norm, but this is a line of time, so it extends infinitely to the end of time, whatever that means.

And then you look the other way. Before the brains were created. Again, oblivion, extending infinitely to the beginning of time (again, whatever that means). So what we end up with is a model with every thing to ever live and ever have lived, laid out side by side in a line, their moments of consciousness being active at different times throughout history.

These lines are quantifiable to an arbitrary number. We could make a statement like "the entire universe has exactly 1.45231*10^1053 perspectives". Which sounds completely ridiculous. It's *because* it sounds so ridiculous, I get the impression that maybe it's wrong to simply say "when the brain stops working, that's it".

[Anonymous No.6034820]

You have a balance beam, the kind of scale that tips from one side to the other, depending on the weight on each side. On each side is a beaker, half-filled with water. The sides are in balance. Now, on the left side, you submerge a ping-pong ball suspended by a string. On the right side, you submerge a steel ball of the same volume as the ping-pong ball suspended from a crane.

Does the balance beam tip to the right, to the left, or does it remain unchanged?

[Anonymous No.6034827]

Imagine a machine that can efficiently rewire your brain. Like in the movie The Matrix when Neo learns martial arts in a second. It's physically plausible, they're already doing it with mice, wouldn't be as easy as in the movie but you could say in 1000 years it'd be possible for such a machine to exist. It does nothing more than what already goes on in your brain already, it nudges neurons synapses and tweaks things. No magic involved.

A villain wants to live forever and believes that using this machine he can swap minds with the body of a child extending his life indefinitely. So the villain downloads his memories and the child's into the machine, and starts the swap. Over the next few days the machine nudges their brain cells synapses into new positions. Nothing extraordinary is going on, synapses change constantly to form memories, nothing is physically swapped from either bodies. Just gentle nudging and tweaking, until at last, the reconfiguration is complete!

A howl of triumph errupts from the child's body, and the now terrified villain's body collapses and dies from stress. The villain's consciousness has now been transferred to the child.

But what actually happened?

The man sat in the brain machine
The man started to act like a little child
The man died.

The child sat in the brain machine
The child started to act like an old man.
The child has his moment of victory.

The procedure was no different from regular day to day living, synapses and neurons were altered. Yet they'd appeared to have swapped consciousness. But they hadn't, it was *an illusion*. They'd just exchanged their knowledge - barely any different from the villain raising the child to act like him.

From the child's point of view, he was just like Neo, learning kungfu - in this case, the memories of the villain.
From the villain's point of view, he lost all his memories and then he died.

[Anonymous No.6034828]

Your consciousness would certainly alter as a result of it, but saying it is "part of it" seems like just playing with semantics. Consciousness is an activity of the brain, not the brain itself.

[Anonymous No.6034860]

>2013
>not believing your "soul" won't be incorporated into a new host

[Anonymous No.6034868]

>>6034860
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdxucpPq6Lc

[Anonymous No.6034893]

>>6034827
Try another variant instead.

Our villain have a machine that can put tiny controllers into all the synapses in the brain.

The controllers sense and transmit signals, but they can also be used to sense and block signals, or create signals where none previously existed. So far so good.

Now the machine rerouts all the villain outputs(movement etc) to the boys and vice versa. The boy now controls the body of the villain and the villain controls the boy. It then flips the sensor data the other way, what the boy see, taste, smell etc is routed to the villains brain and again, the same for the villain.

The current perception of the individuals now is that they've swapped bodies, but if the boy as the villain now picked up that revolver and shot the villain, it would be the boy that died, it's just the routing that's hijacked the actual thinking parts still reside in their original bodies.

Because the machine is bored and a super-AI(and the real villain here), it decides to play a game. It routs the villains sensory data to the villain, and to the boy, the boys own sensory data is blocked. It then blocks the villains motor command centers and routes the boys centers to the villain instead, but the boys motor command in turn is connected to the villains neocortex(personality, executive center) and to further spice it up, the computer generates a third-party model of a hippocampus(memory) that it feeds to the villains neocortex.

So now the villain remember a past where he was a painter and avid philantrope, he have the psychopathic personality of a villain and he commands his body via the motor command of the boy.

Do you mean to say that we still have clear persons in this situation? What if the computer creates a highly precise simulation of the villains neocortex and blocks his original one? Who is who in this situation?

[Anonymous No.6034902]

>>6034893
To further complicate the situation we could use a model where a parllell simulation exists of the person, it matches the person in 99.9% of the signals, and 60% of the signals transmitted are from the model(picked at random)?

Would a person notice this disruption? Movements are smooth, thoughts are smooth, everything is smooth, but you have a shadow mind that takes over the majority of your actions unnoticed. What if we have ten shadow minds instead? And you're only doing things 5% of the time via organic origins? A tiny percentage of your activity would always be from your own brain at any time, but the majority would be distributed from shadow minds. Would you notice this as somekind of disruption? And why would you do so? Would you even notice if some of the shadow minds are diverging from your own? To the neurons of your brain the signal they arrive is indistinguishable from an organic signal?

tl;dr: the brain is an amalgamate of networked functions, there's no molecule of consciousness in it.

[Anonymous No.6034919]

>>6034902
No 'molecule of consciousness'?

Lets simplify this then, back to the classic teleporter thought experiment.

You step into a teleporter, it scans your atoms, creates a copy of you on mars, destroying your original body.

Congratulations, you are now on mars!

Time to go back to earth, same process. But an error happens in the software, and it opens the wrong data file. A different body is created on earth.

Congratulations, you are now on earth, and someone else!

[Anonymous No.6034922]

>>6033914
The edgiest picture ever.

Seriously. If you could make a fractal blade, it still wouldn't be as edgy as that pic.

[Anonymous No.6034931]

>>6034811
I like this idea. Anywhere where I can read more about this way of thinking?

[Anonymous No.6034955]

>>6033955
It's not the brainy part of brain that's responsible for the state of consciousnes so obviously, messing with the cortex won't affect it. Try cutting through lamina tecti and blocking the reticular formation and see what happens.

[Anonymous No.6034965]

>>6034919
>Lets simplify this then
Lets not.
The entire point of my two posts was to get away from the dumbed down focus-on-whole-mind-only scenarios.

If you want examples with teleporters; i teleport half of my brain into another persons head and his half into mine. Did we both die?

What if the teleporter randomly swaps segments between 100 people until everyone have less than some arbitrary percentage of their own brain left?

[Anonymous No.6034975]

>>6033934
luls, people seem to not understand what consciousness is. there is no way to tell if a person/animal is conscious.

therefore you can't know if a person have lost their "conscious" or not even after half their brain is gone.

[Anonymous No.6034990]

>>6034965
Not the first guy who replied.

So we could say there is minimal authentic conscience that you need to keep in order to be "yourself", after the teleportation?

[Anonymous No.6035226]

>>6034931
As far as I'm aware I'm the first person to think this way. If you can spread this idea, then please do. Improve on the model!

[Anonymous No.6035239]

>>6034931
Nietzsche's eternal return to the identical

[Anonymous No.6035276]

>>6034965
Lets take this further.

When you remove sections of the brain, you lose that conscious information. Remove your visual cortex, you can no longer see, remove other parts you can no longer hear, no longer taste, touch...even think.

Lets remove these one by one.

Start with the memory, lets remove all these notions of 'I' before we get started.

So now you're like a child, simply perceiving reacting to stimulus. Remove the visual cortex...now you're blind, remove the sense of touch next, maybe a few other things... one after another, until there's nothing left.

But actually, as the pieces of your brain were removed, they were placed in a vat and recombined, so instead of not existing, you're alive in a vat! Yay!

But there's a clash going on here. With each piece removed, you lose cognition...yet at the end you are whole in another place. This doesn't make sense.

It seems to suggest at one point your experience was being blind and dumb yet able to hear and then just because more than 50% of your brain is together in another place, you suddenly lose your sense of hearing but can see.

And what's going on in the transition phase, is your consciousness split between the brain segments? are you experiencing both being in the vat and in your head at the same time (yet unable to verbally report it)?

By that logic you could say that we're all experiencing eachother's consciousness at the same time but are unable to say we are.

The problem with the materialist view is they refuse to believe in a first person perspective.

They can speak objectively about a situation; but when they really step into the teleporter and see their clone appear on the other side, just like in that cartoon earlier in the thread, then suddenly the reality hits them that maybe there's more to this than the 'birds eye' view would suggest.

[Anonymous No.6035278]

>>6035239
>Nietzsche's eternal return to the identical
No that's just if you imagine that situation loops on itself.

[Anonymous No.6035304]

So don't all of these arguments prove the absurdity of unique consciousness?

[Anonymous No.6035312]

>>6035304
That's the paradox. All these experiments show how absurd it is, yet in the face of all this we're still unique.

You can recant how "we're one" until the end of your life, yet you are still separated from me.
You're not experiencing what I'm experiencing,

Resolve this paradox and you can resolve consciousness. This is the true "hard problem" that everyone seems to build smoke and mirrors of semantics around to avoid answering it.

[Anonymous No.6035319]

>>6035312
Paradoxes cannot be true by their very nature, therefore whatever is required for it to be disproved must be true, regardless of intuitive absurdity.

So would it take anything less than telepathy to resolve this?

[Anonymous No.6035322]

Cut a brain in half completely you have two conciousness. Graft two brains together the conciousness coalescess. This shows that individuality is a temporary condition of seperation. There is no possesive the conciousness belongs to np person or thing. Your just an expierience and that expierience is definite and not imortal and it is defined by its seperation. When you die you are no longer seperated. And you are no longer a "you."

[Anonymous No.6035327]

>>6035319

learn to imagine how others might feel. For example, you get hit with a football in the face by accident. Your friend who stands next to you has had an similar situation in he's life, so he knows the feeling. Basically, by knowing how others feel, your consciousness links to them. Take few years married/engaged couples as an example. It is proven, that their thoughts match by certain percentage and can communicate with each other just by giving a look. So technically, at that moment, two consciousnesses become one.

Get the point?

[Anonymous No.6035330]

I hate consciousness problems. Its especially annoying when you have an idea but can't explain exactly what you mean.

[Anonymous No.6035347]

>>6035319
That's the point. There's the whole wave particle duality paradox of quantum physics that despite Einstein's objections, remains persistent.

So, work out a framework for consciousness, since no one else seems to be trying other than looking at mri scans and saying "ooh, maybe it's there", and by Jupter, you could be onto something!

>>6035327
That's a good train of thought

[Anonymous No.6035525]

>>6035330
^this.

[Anonymous No.6035540]

No, because the ant is destroying functional parts of your brain, not integrating itself into the functional whole.

Now, if the ant somehow removed its own brain and stitched its neurons into yours, then it'd become part of your consciousness and maybe you'd start an aphid farm or some shit.

[Anonymous No.6036450]

>>6035540

We could do that with humans, merge the neurons of 2 or more people together, A and B. You'd both become one person with an identity crisis.

Then you divide the brain in two again but not in the original order, so you have two people again.

And *then* you kill one of them. Going from the original point of view of person A, what happened? Are you now in a state of infinite nothing? Or are you partially conscious like, you can see a little and sometimes partial thoughts enter your mind?

[Anonymous No.6036500]

Where does your field of vision end?

[None !!BJiYgff8zf2 No.6036510]

I'm tired of these pseudo-scientific morons coming here with whatever idea they just shat out in a moment of colossal ignorance, thinking that they somehow managed to think outside the box that thousands of scientists are, according to their idiotic world view, trapped in. If you haven't studied the physics behind your dumbfuckery then don't post it on /sci/, because you just pollute the board and look like an idiot. Philososhit does not belong here. Take your oh so edgy teenager babble to /b/ or /x/.
>thought experiment
You have no idea what that word means in science. Spoiler: It doesn't mean posting inane drivel.
Why don't you fuck off back to /b/? You come here to NOT discuss science. Did you ever consider that /sci/ might not be the right board for you? This is /sci/ - science and math. Shitposting goes to /b/.
You are the shitposter, you are the problem. Stop posting and the quality improves.

[Anonymous No.6036524]

>>6034004
No. It's a stupid little bug up in your brain biting shit. If your consciousness could be seen as a ghost it'd be another little separate consciousness moving around inside of you, fucking you up from a hard-to-reach place. No different than an ant biting your arm, just an ant biting more vital shit.

If you and the ant merged and formed a symbiotic relationship and you could control the ant, even subconsciously, then that would be arguable.

[Anonymous No.6036525]

>>6036510

Damn right. It's not REAL science like string theory which there is no proof of and can't predict anything!

[Anonymous No.6036544]

>>6036510

Damn straight! REAL SCIENCE is totally done on an anonymous image board like 4chan! go bak 2 b you silly plebs!

[Anonymous No.6036554]

>>6036510
Saved for later posting

>>6036525
Are you actually saying theoretical physicists aren't scientists?
>>6036544
It would be fin if this kind of thread appeared once in a while. These retards are here EVERY DAY posting retarded shit about consciousness, evolution, and why its wrong because whatever the fuck they dreamed up.
It's shitposting, and it's got to stop. Consciousness threads should be banned.

[Anonymous No.6036561]

>>6033934
Can't tell if trolling, 10/10 if so.

[Anonymous No.6036566]

The ant's been your consciousness all along because it is matter and belongs to the same universe.

[Anonymous No.6036583]

>>6036450
There's too much uncertainty in that to predict anything. Would both minds survive the transplant or would one overwhelm and destroy the other? Would they mutually annihilate, or would they fuse to become one new person.

And when you re-separated them, would they/it just die?

Too many unknowns.

[Anonymous No.6036587]

>>6036450
What kind of a world are you living in? Merge neurons of 2 people together, what?
First of all, what is the method of "merging", do you plan on just squishing the brain into the other guys skull or something?
And then you divide it!
Also
>state of infinite nothing

Honestly anon, your highschool is showing.

[Anonymous No.6036592]

>>6036554

If trying to model consciousness to predict outcomes isn't science, even when it's based on subjective flaky evidence, then something like string theory with no predictive power or provability is just the confabulations of madmen playing games with maths.

[Anonymous No.6036596]

>>6034922
It's clearly aimed at those fucking hippies who won't shut up about how they've been enlightened after having some shrooms. I hate them as much as the pic does, and so should everyone else.

[Anonymous No.6036598]

>>6036554
The very core of science is observation. We know it exists because we have evidence it exists and here is my observations to demonstrate that. If you are working on something like say the multiverse idea whereby there can be no observations to demonstrate that the idea is real or accurate then it is not science. You can put it in the same pile as tarot cards because both have the same amount of observable evidence to back it up.

[Anonymous No.6036600]

>>6036566

mind = blown

[Anonymous No.6036605]

I had an idea that relates to consciousness or rather perception. Let's say that in the future we could route our neurons into an engineered brain of a dog, so we start to perceive the world through a dog's brain. we will have it's impulses, thoughts and all that. Would such thing be possible? to place a unique "filter" on our neurons so we could simulate the perception of other animals on ourselves? that would be cool.

[Anonymous No.6036611]

>>6036605

There's a book written about that recently

http://www.amazon.com/Mindmelding-Consciousness-Neuroscience-Minds-Privacy/dp/0199231907

[Anonymous No.6038168]

>>6036605
Thank you for your insightful contribution to this board.

[Anonymous No.6038190]

>>6036611
what if we mind melded two people one who was about to die and one who as healthy. And we repeated the process. Would that achieve immortality?

How many people could we mind meld at once.

[Anonymous No.6038208]

>>6033914

It is a STATE
like, what STATE is that logic gate in, 1 or 0?

HOW FUCKING HARD IS THIS?????

[Anonymous No.6039557]

>>6038208
A state is a ray in a Hilbert space.

[Anonymous No.6039582]

>fatalist reductionist materialism
I hope you don't etc...

[Anonymous No.6039585]

>>6033914

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Assuming+consciousness+is+an+emergent+property+of+the+brain%3A+If+a+small+creature+were+to+get+in+there+like+an+ant%2C+and+started+biting+at+your+grey+matter%2C+altering+your+neurons%2C+does+the+ant+become+part+of+your+consciousness%3F

[Anonymous No.6039602]

>"Romanticized. Bullshit"
>Empiricist nihilism
>Scientific truth is the same as philosophical truth

[Anonymous No.6041290]

>>6039602
Science is the only system for obtaining truth. "U cannot know nuthin" is in direct opposition to any pursuit of knowledge.

[Anonymous No.6041298]

>>6041290
Empirical fact and philisophical 'truth' are not the same thing. Thats what I just said. How can you be this obtuse?
And what the FUCK does that mean, and why does /sci/ keep spouting it regarding philosophy?

[Anonymous No.6041319]

>>6041298
Further on this, I dont get /sci/s gripes with philosophy. Philosophy has absolutely jack fucking shit to do with any kind of science. Its not a science and it has ABSOLUTELY -NOTHING- to do with science.

[Anonymous No.6041320]

>>6033914
Go to bed, OP, you're stoned.

[Anonymous No.6041342]

>>6041319
>>6041298
No, no, no, fuck this
Im gone
I only come to this board in hopes of a nice space thread or two but I just end up seething at you dense empiricist fucks.
I hate all of you. I hope you got beat up and stolen from in school. Fucking nerds.

[Mr. Jew No.6041351]

>>6033914
thats like if a speck of dust gets stuck between your eyeball and eye socket does it become part of your vision?