Is consciousness an emergent property of the brain?

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Robert_Sock said:
If the mind was simply a product of the brain, memories should be stored there, however, scientists have never shown this to be the case.
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Animals have memory. For example, a dog will remember various things. So can cats.
 
Any sporadic firing of the synapses after clinical death would not be “high functioning”(my words) enough to produce anything remotely resembling the complex brain function needed in order to produce a dream.
 
AgnosticBoy said:
I’ve read one of Chalmer’s old books that’s called The Conscious Mind. He didn’t use non-locality to explain consciousness. You might be referring to Deepak Chopra?

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I am not sure who it was. One of the guys talked about in Talbot’s “Holographic Universe” probably. or Haisch’s “The God Theory”
 
The memory of an animal can be entirely explained by classical conditioning (see Pavlov). But put the animal under heavy distress and all those memories will disappear. Human memory is much different! I still maintain that human memory, not that produced by classical conditioning, is very different!
 
No, the memory of animals is based entirely on primitive classical conditioning, like Pavlov’s dog’s salivating at the sound of a bell. Classical conditioning works on humans as well, but mostly when we think of memory we are consciously aware of it, animals are supposedly not consciously aware of it. It’s two totally different types of memory!
 
Another way of explaining animal memory is that it’s a conditioned reflex, unlike cognitive human memory.
 
St. Anselm’s ontological argument and Thomas Aquinas’ proofs
 
Do we even know what consciousness is? Do we even know what it means to be physical?

How can we say we know that consciousness is physical if we don’t even have a strong grasp of what these things are?

Heck, do we even know what an “emergent property” is?

Christi pax.
 
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Simply put, consciousness is a state of awareness. Here’s a definition that I found from David Chalmers’ book, The Conscious Mind: pg. 5
Before proceeding, a note on terminology. The term “consciousness” is ambiguous, referring to a number of phenomena. Sometimes it is used to refer to a cognitive capacity, such as the ability to introspect or to report one’s mental states. Sometimes it is used synonymously with “awakeness”. Sometimes it is closely tied to our ability to focus attention, or to voluntarily control our behavior. Sometimes “to be conscious of something” comes to the same thing as “to know about something”. All of these are accepted uses of the term, but all pick out phenomena distinct from the subject I am discussing, and phenomena that are significantly less difficult to explain. I will say more about these alternative notions of consciousness later, but for now, when I talk about consciousness, I am talking only about the subjective quality of experience: what it is like to be a cognitive agent
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Regarding “emergent property”

Here’s Chalmers’s:
Sometimes it is objected that consciousness might be an emergent property, in a sense that is still compatible with materialism. In recent work on complex systems and artificial life, it is often held that emergent properties are unpredictable from low-level properties, but that they are physical all the same. Examples are the emergence of self-organization in biological systems, or the emergence of flocking patterns from simple rules in simulated birds (Langton 1990; Reynolds 1987). But emergent properties of this sort are not analogous to consciousness. What is interesting about these cases is that the relevant properties are not obvious consequences of low-level laws; but they are still logically supervenient on low-level facts. Ifall the physical facts about a biological system over time are given, the fact that self-organization is occurring will be straightforwardly derivable. This is just what we would expect, as properties such as self-organization and flocking are straightforwardly functional and structural.

If consciousness is an emergent property, it is emergent in a much stronger sense. There is a stronger notion of emergence, used by the British emergentists (e.g., Broad 1925), according to which emergent properties are not even predictable from the entire ensemble of low-level physical facts. It is reasonable to say (as the British emergentists did) that conscious experience is emergent in this sense. But this sort of emergence is best counted as a variety of property dualism. Unlike the more “innocent” examples of emergence given above, the strong variety requires new fundamental laws in order that the emergent properties emerge.
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Source: The Conscious Mind pgs. 114-115

The concept of strong emergence has been extended to involve higher level properties having causal powers - that is being able to control/direct lower level parts/properties. At the time of Chalmers’s book, unfortunately he did not know about the scientific evidence that shows the mind control/change brain structure/function which fits right in with strong emergence. The evidence is strong, testable, and increasing!
 
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1Lord1Faith said:
Any sporadic firing of the synapses after clinical death would not be “high functioning”(my words) enough to produce anything remotely resembling the complex brain function needed in order to produce a dream.
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It makes sense but they are not truly dead. They are near death, and in that state their brains are malfunctioning.

However, whatever goes on, what is special is the existence of a memory. How can a person remember if the brain cannot form an experience.

The dreams that occur when we sleep, their formation and later recollection, may be attributed to mere activity of the brain.

Near death experiences point to the possibility the events happen to the spirit which transform it. Later, when we regain consciousness, we do so as a changed person. Tapping into that change, we reexperience what happened to us, now able because of a functioning brain to translate it into words which we can communicate to ourselves and others.
 
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thephilosopher6 said:
Within the last few decades, neuroscience has taken great leaps forward into uncovering the mystery of the nature of consciousness, how it arises, and what contributes to it. Although there is still a long way to go, and much is still unknown waiting to be uncovered, neuroscience seems to be heading in the direction that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the brain, not separable from the physical.
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Yes. They showed that there is a correlation between brain activity and mode of consciousness.
thephilosopher6 said:
The evidence just seems much more in favor of this line of thinking than it does in dualistic ideas of the mind and body.
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Yes, there is a center in the brain which creates the sense of self. So why bother with mind, Occam’s razor rules out mind.
thephilosopher6 said:
How are we to respond to this? How is it possible to reconcile faith with science here? What arguments are there that the mind is separate from the physical?
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I am amused with the problem of free will and intentionality. How something which emerges from brain activity can affect brain, you have control on thigs? How could be free if we are made of particles which each follows laws of nature?
 
STT said:
How could be free if we are made of particles which each follows laws of nature?
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There may be some uncertainty in the “laws” of nature. Particles may not follow absolute Newtonian type laws with complete causal determinism.
 
@AgnosticBoy
Simply put, consciousness is a state of awareness. Here’s a definition that I found from David Chalmers’ book, The Conscious Mind: pg. 5
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Why do we care if consciousness is based in the brain or not? Arisotle and Plato and almost all ancient thinkers thought awareness was physical, and what Descartes, Locke, and Leibinz mean by the term is more complex and basically different from mere “awareness.”

“Emergent properties” just sounds like a cheap and dirty way to reintroduce substantial form into intellectual discourse, at least according to what I understand Dr. Chambers as saying.

@STT
Yes. They showed that there is a correlation between brain activity and mode of consciousness.
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Because we couldn’t figure that out by throwing rocks at someone’s head…

…it looks like Cain might have been the first neuroscientist, huh? 😉
Yes, there is a center in the brain which creates the sense of self. So why bother with mind, Occam’s razor rules out mind.
I am amused with the problem of free will and intentionality. How something which emerges from brain activity can affect brain, you have control on things?
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“What’s a brain” then is the more interesting question: if intentionally is physical, what does it mean to be physical?
How could be free if we are made of particles which each follows laws of nature?
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Well, considering how no one bothers to explain what they mean by “will,” and why it might be said to be “free”…let’s just talk pass each other 🙂

Christi pax.
 
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Lucretius said:
Because we couldn’t figure that out by throwing rocks at someone’s head…

…it looks like Cain might have been the first neuroscientist, huh? 😉
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People use to think that that is the soul which animate body. Now people questioning this: what is the use of brain if that is soul which bring life into the body?
Lucretius said:
“What’s a brain” then is the more interesting question: if intentionally is physical, what does it mean to be physical?
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We don’t know yet what physical is. Physicists trying to come with an idea about that. What we best know about physical in microscopic level summarized as standard model but this model is not anomaly free, dark matter, dark energy, quantum gravity, etc. What physicists trying to find? They are trying to see if there is a core structure in what we call matter. It seems that the core structure, particles, obeying a set of laws, so called laws of nature. So we almost know how particles behave in microscopic level although the picture is not complete yet so there might be a long way to go.

I think we can agree with what is described as physical in the previous paragraph but what is more interesting is when you have an assembly of particles together. We face with different phenomena in macroscopic level, when the number of particles is very high. Each of this phenomena however is explicable in term of core structure. Where a new phenomena could possibly come from if matter is only an assembly of particles? So it seems that any phenomena should be explicable in term of laws of nature, the particles configuration and the way particles move, whether the phenomena is the solidity, wetness, consciousness, etc.

To be honest, I am getting sure that something like mind, something which experiences things, does not exist at all. What exist is mere experience produced by brain activity. I am however amused with this state of consciousness since it comes with additional power so called intentionality (the quality of mental states (e.g., thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes) that consists in their being directed toward some object or state of affairs). The intentionality could not be more than a manifestation of how matter move and how is its shape. The particle are directed toward an end which this manifest itself as intentionality at macroscopic level.
Lucretius said:
Well, considering how no one bothers to explain what they mean by “will,” and why it might be said to be “free”…let’s just talk pass each other 🙂

Christi pax.
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To me will can be defined as internally motivated action. We know through introspection that we have will. We know that we are free too. The question that how we could be free however stays open when we know that matter obeys laws of nature. I have a thread on this topic. It seems to me that we cannot be free if set of identities so called laws of nature is finite. So the only solution which comes to my mind is to consider the set to be very large, infinite.
 
STT said:
So it seems that any phenomena should be explicable in term of laws of nature
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How do you know that these “laws” are absolute and definitive and do not allow for uncertainties?
 
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