by Jared T | Jul 30, 2020 | Consciousness, What is consciousness
“Consciousness survives death. You may think this is a religious or metaphysical claim, but it is not. To understand how this is possible, you simply have to accept a definition of consciousness that most of us already do: consciousness is a dynamic relationship between environment and individual. Anything that perceives the world, responds to it, and influences it is conscious. Some may argue that environment and individual are actually one, but for the purpose of this thought experiment we will consider them separate.
It is obvious that humans are conscious. We perceive the world with eyes, ears, limbs, and mind. We respond to it with thoughts, words, and actions. We influence it in every way that make change. Although consciousness may be the most complex for humans, is it unique to us? Certainly not. Although a chimpanzee may have a simpler view of the world, it still perceives, responds to, and interacts with it. A praying mantis does too, and the same is true all the way down the tree of life. Although the consciousness of simpler beings becomes less multidimensional, it still exists. If you accept the above definition of consciousness, you even have to cede that a simple, single cellular E. Coli bacteria is conscious. It perceives concentrations of favorable chemicals, and responds by moving the flagellum (little paddles that propel the bacteria) to approach those chemicals. As it processes them, the very environment is influenced as well. All three of the dimensions of consciousness are met. The conscious experience of an E. Coli is certainly less rich and less complex than that of a human, but it exists nonetheless.
Now consider the idea that perhaps consciousness can exist even outside the domain of biological life. An electron perceives the forces of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. It responds by movement, and even influences nearby particles with its own fields. At the subatomic level, consciousness is perhaps as simple as it may become, yet subjective experience for that electron exists. The same may be true of celestial bodies, which are sensitive to, affected by, and sources of forces of gravity.
Everything is conscious, although along a spectrum of complexity. When we die, the experience we humans are familiar with decomposes along with our bodies. We no longer perceive, respond to, or influence the complex systems of sociology, psychology, neuroscience, infrastructure, or government. Our complex and rich consciousness is substituted with billions of simpler ones, first as the bacteria in our bodies die off and eventually as the atomic matter is all there is to “us.” We don’t cease to perceive, respond, and influence. We just do it differently.
Who knows, maybe it’s nice to be an electron.”
by Deanna A | Jul 5, 2020 | Do we have free will or is everything pre-determined
“Yes we have freewill. Free will of the spirit. Though we do not realize this at a body level, so it looks like an illusion. Earth is a ‘free-will’ zone meaning that: anything goes. We create our own karma and resolve our own karma through way of our actions, agreements, contracts, and treatment of others.”
by Paul Thagard - PhD | May 30, 2020 | Consciousness, Top Rated Theories, Which came first: humans or consciousness
“A provocative new book by Arthur Reber argues that bacteria are conscious and that the origins of mind are found in the simplest, single-celled organisms that arose billions of years ago. Here are some alternative answers to the question of when consciousness began.
Hypotheses About the Origins of Consciousness
- Consciousness has always existed, because God is conscious and eternal.
- Consciousness began when the universe formed, around 13.7 billion years ago (panpsychism).
- Consciousness began with single-celled life, around 3.7 billion years ago (Reber).
- Consciousness began with multicellular plants, around 850 million years ago.
- Consciousness began when animals such as jellyfish got thousands of neurons, around 580 million years ago.
- Consciousness began when insects and fish developed larger brains with about a million neurons (honeybees) or 10 million neurons (zebrafish) around 560 million years ago.
- Consciousness began when animals such as birds and mammals developed much larger brains with hundreds of millions of neurons, around 200 million years ago.
- Consciousness began with humans, homo sapiens, around 200,000 years ago.
- Consciousness began when human culture became advanced, around 3,000 years ago (Julian Jaynes).
- Consciousness does not exist, as it is just a scientific mistake (behaviorism} or a “user illusion” (Daniel Dennett).
I think that number 7 (consciousness began with mammals and birds) is currently the most plausible hypothesis, but the issue deserves examination.
How Can You Tell Something Is Conscious?
Except for your own introspection, consciousness is not directly observable, so it can only be inferred through the available evidence. This form of inference is common in science and everyday life—for example, when scientists accept the existence of non-observable entities such as the Big Bang, electrons, forces, and genes because they provide a better explanation than alternative hypotheses, based on the full range of available evidence.
How do you know that you are conscious? One piece of evidence is that you feel you are conscious—but this might be a mistake, as behaviorists and some philosophers have argued. Fortunately, there is additional evidence that you are conscious, including your verbal reports of conscious experiences, and your complex behaviors such as ones related to pain, emotions, and imagery that can be explained by your having these conscious experiences.
Moreover, there are beginning to be deeper neurological explanations of how consciousness comes about through interactions of numerous brain areas. So inference to the best explanation supports the hypothesis that you are conscious, as superior to the alternative hypothesis that you only act as if you are conscious.
The same form of reasoning supports the conclusion that other human beings are also conscious. You do not have direct access to the experiences of others, but you can observe their behaviors related to pain, emotion, and imagination, and you can hear their reports of conscious experience. Moreover, the brain structures and processes in other people are very similar to yours.
Alternative explanations, such as that other people are zombies without consciousness, have no evidence to support them. Therefore, it is plausible that other people are conscious just like you. This is not just a weak argument from analogy, but an inference to the best explanation that relies on the fact that the evidence and explanations for the consciousness of other people are almost as convincing as the arguments for yourself.
The evidence for consciousness in nonhuman animals is weaker, because they cannot report their conscious experiences. In a previous blog post, I conducted a debate on whether animals have emotions, which is difficult because there are alternative explanations for why animals such as cats and dogs seem to have emotions. Maybe their apparent happiness is just reward-related behavior, and maybe their apparent fear is just threat-related behavior.
However, as I will report in a future blog post, I have become convinced that grief is widespread in mammals such as elephants, chimpanzees, and dogs, where their actions are too complicated to be explained by simple behavioral accounts. Therefore, I now think that the best explanation of mammal behaviors related to pain, pleasure, and complex emotions is that they have conscious experiences. The same arguments apply to big-brained birds such as ravens and parrots that are capable of complex problem solving and learning.
The evidence becomes much sparser if you move down to smaller-brained animals such as bees and fish. Honeybees do exhibit reward-related behaviors, and fish exhibit pain-related behaviors, but it is not at all clear that these require an explanation based on conscious experience. At best, we can put a question mark beside hypothesis number 6.
Similarly, simpler animals such as jellyfish and even plants can show behaviors such as sensing, reacting to sensory inputs, and signaling in response to environmental influences, but there are simple, stimulus-response explanations of what they were doing that do not require the attribution of consciousness.
Bacteria
So why does Reber think that bacteria are conscious? He correctly notes that single-celled organisms have powerful ways of sensing their environments to detect sources of food and toxicity. Moreover, bacteria live in biofilms of large numbers of individuals that communicate with each by secreting chemicals that spread important environmental information about food and toxins. Bacteria are capable of moving individually and collectively to get closer to food and farther from toxic substances. Perhaps sensing, reacting, communicating, and moving are best explained by the hypothesis that bacteria have some degree of consciousness.
But machines are also capable of sensing, reacting, communicating, and moving—for example, the self-driving cars that are being developed by Google, Uber, General Motors, and other companies. Reber thinks not only that such machines are not currently conscious, but that they never could be, because he accepts the discredited thought experiment of John Searle that artificial intelligence is impossible because the symbols used by machines are inherently meaningless. Christopher Parisien and I argued a decade ago that self-driving cars are capable of semantics in the same way as human brains, through interacting with the world and learning about it. So machines that interact with the world can have meaningful representations even though they do not yet have consciousness.
Engineers know exactly how self-driving cars work because they built them, and can explain their operations without invoking consciousness. Self-driving cars do not display behaviors such as pain, emotions, and imagery that consciousness helps to explain in birds and mammals. Self-driving cars and even thermostats refute Reber’s claim that when an event is sensed it is felt.
Another oddity of Reber’s view is that he thinks that plants, which evolved from single-celled organisms, lack consciousness, even though they are capable of sensing, reacting, signaling other plants, and reorienting themselves toward the sun.
Reber’s main reasons for attributing consciousness to single-celled organisms are not that it provides the best explanation of the available evidence, but rather that this attribution solves philosophical problems. He thinks that his theory of the cellular basis of consciousness provides the most plausible answer to the problem of emergence. Consciousness is a property of objects very different from simple properties such as consisting of atoms and molecules, or even firings of neurons; thus, all of hypotheses 2-9 face the problem of figuring out how consciousness became a property of wholes when it is not a property of their parts or a simple aggregate of the properties of their parts. article continues after advertisement
Fortunately, there are new theories of how consciousness could emerge as a property of large numbers of individual neurons even though it is not a property of individual neurons. Stanislas Dehaene thinks that emergence comes from the broadcast of information across brain areas, whereas I argue in my new book Brain-Mind that the key properties are patterns of firing of neurons, binding of these patterns into more complex patterns, and competition among the resulting patterns.
Both of these hypotheses about the emergence of consciousness in large brains have the advantage that they attribute consciousness to just those organisms for which there is evidence concerning pain, emotions, and imagery. We have no reason to attribute pain, emotions, or imagery to bacteria, so the attribution of consciousness is superfluous.
Another philosophical reason that Reber gives for his cellular basis of consciousness is that it provides a solution to the philosophical “hard problem” of consciousness: there is something that it is like to be conscious. But Reber’s view does no better than others in accounting for the feeling aspects of consciousness, which can better be handled by breaking the problem down into specific aspects of pain and specific aspects of emotion. Without wallowing in the vagueness of “what it is like,” specific aspects of conscious experience of emotion and imagery can be given neuralexplanations, as I show in Brain-Mind.
Therefore, Reber’s theory of the cellular basis of consciousness helps little with the philosophical problems of emergence and experience. Given his appreciation of scientific evidence, he should be able to recognize that the evidence for consciousness in single-celled organisms is much worse than the evidence for consciousness in self-driving cars, which already exhibit much more complex sensing, reacting, moving, and communicating than bacteria. Moreover, there are progressing alternative hypotheses of how consciousness emerges through the complex operations of large brains capable of representing the world, learning about it, representing representations, and communicating with other brains.
Although I think that Reber is wrong about bacterial consciousness, I recommend reading his book. It is full of interesting scientific information, trenchant discussions of important issues, and entertaining stories. Sometimes, mistaken ideas can contribute to intellectual progress.”
References
Reber, A. S. (2019). The first minds: Caterpillars, ‘karyotes, and consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thagard, P. (2019). Brain-mind: From neurons to consciousness and creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.
by Chyrese S | May 30, 2020 | Consciousness, What are dreams / why do we dream
“Lets start with a visual. Take for example a ray of light, as in shining from a light source, and shining it into a prism. You would be able to see all these different aspects of light, moving and fragmenting themselves, extending to different facets of reality. This light shining is you and through the prism you see all these different aspects of you. YOU are a multidimensional being. All the light rays are aspects of you.
Brief overview of consciousness and multidimensionality:
- “Dimensions” are a means of organizing different planes of existence according to their vibratory rate. Each dimension has certain sets of laws and principles that are specific to the frequency of that dimension.
- “Consciousness” represents awareness. The inhabitants of each dimension function clearly, easily, and with a minimum of resistance within that plane because their consciousness vibrates in resonance with the frequency of that dimension.
- “Multidimensional Consciousness” is the ability to be “conscious” of more than one dimension. To be multidimensional in our consciousness we must remember that we have within us the potential to expand our perceptual awareness to the dimensions above and below our physical plane.
- “Unconscious” means unaware of and unable to attend to internal and/or external stimuli within the inhabitants’ own dimension or within another dimension. Third dimensional humans are largely unaware of their first dimensional, second dimensional, and fourth dimensional selves. The human unconscious is best accessed through physical body messages, introspection, dreams, and meditation.
- “Conscious” means aware of and able to attend to stimuli within the inhabitants’ own dimension. The third dimensional self is conscious of what can be perceived by the five physical senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.
- “Superconscious” is a higher order of consciousness of the fifth dimension and above in which the inhabitants are able to be aware of and attend stimuli of their own dimension as well as all the lower dimensions. The superconscious is innately multidimensional. The third dimensional self can become “conscious” of the superconscious through meditation, prayer, and by surrendering to the enfoldment of the higher order consciousness.
When you are dreaming you are retracting aspects of yourself. Yes, dreams seem like a great adventure, yes they seem to be unrelated to your physical life here, and at times they are fantastic. But the purpose of the dream is to pull together part and parcel of what has been splintered.
When you have “good dreams” it is a representation of your capabilities, it is you in harmony. It is symbolic translation of what you are going through. Saying to yourself,”Hey, you are happy, keep it up. Do what you love.”
If you have a “bad dream” it is a parallel version of what you are experiencing here in this life. Saying to yourself, “Hey, this vibration is out of alignment. You should maybe take a look at this.”
Okay, phew, indeed you have your higher self connected to you, obviously, but also you have parallel reality lifetimes which include MANY other beings, past and future lives, and the “you” here and now (even though all is now). And all that information is YOU. You need it for the growth of your soul. You are not just a wandering zombie, you are learning compassion or kindness. Or total chaos and destruction. Each journey is unique and important for the growth of a soul.
I have a friend who helps injured wild animals. He often has a crow, salamander, a frog, or some other bird and a opossum. I wonder, “How in the world do you find all these animals?” I rarely see an injured animal weak enough for me to take home and nurture. Well, these things are in his path, he is experiencing being a steward of the Earth by helping animals. That path is not the same as mine. You create the reality that helps you learn what your soul is seeking. And your dreams guide you, tell you, reflect you, remind you, and help you experience what you need to continue your purpose, if you will.
If you kept a dream journal and then mapped all the places you go, the things you learn, the people you visit, you will learn exactly who you are!
One more thing; when you go to bed at night to sleep, your dreams reflect the vibrational quality you are in when you went to bed. You do not gain momentum while you sleep. So when you pay attention to the dream it is most important to look at the quality of the dream, it’s your compass.”
by Tyke M | May 30, 2020 | Consciousness, Do we have free will or is everything pre-determined
“We know free will does exist for many reasons. I’ll stay away from quantum mechanics for now and list three obvious reasons we know free will is a factual part of consciousness. 1. We directly experience it. I make choices all the time. I’m pretty sure you do too. You can decide to go for a ride or to lay out by the pool. You are not forced against your will to do these things. Materialist religion holds that intelligent agency does not exist, so this rather vocal minority of adherents will insist that when you think you are deciding things, it is just an “illusion”, they say.
Word to the wise: Always seriously question anybody who tells you evidence, logic and your own direct experience is an “illusion” and you are to align with their beliefs instead, because they said so.
2. It is mathematically insane. If anyone is seriously buying into the denial of free will, give some serious thought to the alternative. If free will does not really exist, even though it seems very much like it does, then our actions are not based on our intelligent decisions, but on the happenstance of, I suppose… chemistry, of all things. I don’t know what else UN-intelligent they could possibly be claiming, and they ARE materialists after all.
So these magical materials force us to do things, but they just happen to align with both our needs AND our wants, not because we chose them, goodness no, but because we got lucky in a cosmic dominoes game.
Just go ahead and try asking them what the odds of those constant, moment by moment lucky breaks are, but don’t expect a straight answer. The odds against any living thing accomplishing complex functional movement by chemical necessity rather than conscious volition is as close to zero as any odds that could ever be calculated and then some.
3. It fails to take into account how mental states work. In the materialist religion, all things mental are also an “illusion”, somehow magically caused by standard chemistry by constant extreme luck. Lets be clear here: If the brain was formed by random slop rather than intelligence, then the resultant mind would be incoherent noise with no relation whatsoever to reasoning or problem solving.
Fortunately, this isn’t a hopeless problem because we do know that the brain IS formed by our thoughts, not the other way around. In fact, it is repeatedly demonstrated that if you think a thought intensely enough or repetitively enough, neuroplasticity in the axons and dendrites will alter the neural pathways of your brain. This is known as Hebb’s Law and it is the very cornerstone of neuroscience.
Thoughts aren’t physical, but they can intelligently control the physical. Intelligent agency is a demonstrable reality. Free will is what agency does. When we make a decision, there are not-so-coincidentally chemo-electric data transmissions happening, even though these reactions weren’t happening when we didn’t need them somehow, and the neural pathways these reactions travel along form only when we choose for them to.
There aren’t nearly enough neural pathways in the brain to account for all types of thought or for that matter, even one aspect of thought, such as facial recognition. The brain is a tool used for reflexivity, standardization, speed and efficiency, recall (not memory!), perceptions and body control as directed by free will. The mind is the originator of all thought, reader of perceptions, rememberer, creator of all unique, abstract and moment by moment thought, subjective experiencer, chooser and user of the mind-brain partnership.
So…. the fact that it SEEMS like you have a free will is quite simply because you do.
When all else fails, and two sides are making contradictory claims, would the materialists in the room please try not to be offended if we use the scientific method? Lets test it out to see who is right. Make a choice. Yep go ahead… Decide to do something that you CAN do, if you choose to. Were you able to do it?
Yep, me too…..
by Todd W | May 30, 2020 | Consciousness, Do we have free will or is everything pre-determined
“Free Will is an illusion, and here is the logical reasoning that explains why: A chess program thinks for a moment, its algorithms running at inconceivable speeds. Split seconds pass by while it assesses billions of potential moves and counter moves. It finally chooses, and in an instant you realize that you’ve been crushed again by the computer. This is the shared experience of any chess player who bravely challenges the world’s top chess programs. Even the best human players can no longer avoid this experience. Yet do humans get the last laugh? Does free will put us above such rudimentary processing machines? It seems that way, but logic says otherwise.
Choice
When you think of free will, inevitably you’re brought to the human idea of choice. Yet choice itself proves nothing. The chess playing program chooses every time it decides upon a move. The choices just happen to be the result of a complicated algorithm capable of beating human chess players.
You need to illustrate that you are free to choose to logically illustrate free will. This should be easy you might say. But I promise you, its not only difficult ~ it is logically impossible!
Prior Causes
No matter how impressive the playing skills of a chess computer, we know that every choice it makes is entirely the result of a prior cause. The program takes a series of data (moves, position, time, theory) and calculates its best move. There is no freedom involved, each decision is entirely chained to the data. Change the inputs, and the choices it makes will change.
We can definitively say that any choice that is the result of a prior cause is not the result of freedom – it is the result of that cause. Just like the billiard ball whose motion can be traced back through a series of prior causes, so can each of the moves of a chess playing program provided you can understand its coding.
What about you? How many of the choices you make are the result of prior causes versus free will?
Consider how much freedom you had in your choice to think about chess playing programs just now. Or purple monkeys. Both ideas were just input into your mind because you read these words. These are prior causes, which by definition are void of free will.
But take it a step further. What about every preference you have? Did you choose your favorite color or is it an existing preference derived from elements outside of your influence? Though your preferences can change, do you control this? If you prefer the color blue, can you force yourself to prefer the color purple?
Any choice you make based on a preference, whether it be something simple like an apple over an orange, or more complex that mixes many preferences like a particular career path – each time these choices are developed entirely on preexisting data that your brain processes.
You are capable of choosing, but you are not capable of changing the elements that influence those choices any more than you can change the past or that chess playing programs can alter their inputs. Yet you say, I am free to choose an orange even if I prefer an apple. But what would cause you to choose against your preferences? As soon as you can answer that, you are back to another cause, and in fact just replacing one cause for another. As long as there is a cause, just like with the chess playing program, there can be no free will.
Life Experience
With every decision, you have a lifetime of experience to rely on. Yet all your wisdom and moral leanings are based on what you’ve developed up that this point in life. Your values, no matter how they are developed, are mere inputs that influence each decision in the same manner that the chess playing program uses certain principles to decide its best move.
You may argue that your moral compass isn’t based on any life experience, you were born a certain way, or your soul defines who you are. But what freedom did you have to be born a certain way or with a particular soul? Even if these elements represent the overwhelming source of what influences your choices, you are still not free to choose them at birth any more than you are free to choose your parents or your genetic composition.
Illustrative Example
Sam Harris offers an astoundingly simple yet profound experiment in his book“Free Will” that demonstrates how easy it is to overlook a lack of free will. To paraphrase: There are over 2 million cities around the world. Pick a particular city.
Think about the process that just took place in your brain. Were you free to choose any city on the planet? You would have to know the name of every city for that to be even possible. You were therefore not free to choose any city.
But even among those cities that you do know, were you free to choose any of them? Did you consciously review every city you know the name of and rule most of them out? What naturally occurs is a small selection of cities appear in your thoughts, and you chose from among this group. But what causes this particular list of cities to appear?
Perhaps you visited these cities recently, read about them, or saw a picture of one on the wall. Maybe they are places you have lived, saw on television, or heard mentioned in a nearby conversation. What is important to note here is that you have no conscious control over the small selection of cities that popped into your thoughts. The entire selection you had to choose from is the result of prior causes, many of which you might not even be able to explain.
Take it a step further. What made you choose the particular city from this small group? Personal preference? Randomness? It had to be something. And whatever it was, it had a cause. If it had a prior cause, its was not free.
You can analyze the process of any choice in this manner. It is always either a prior cause, an external factor, complete randomness, or a combination of all three. Yet in none of these areas does logic permit free will
Back to Billiards
Consider for a moment a game of billiards. A shot is taken that sets multiple balls into motion. If the exact same setup could be reconstructed, and the exact same initial shot taken, the balls would end up in the identical position. The laws of physics do not permit otherwise.
Compare this to the manner in which you define your choices. If you could live your entire life up to this moment the with the exact same set of experiences and circumstances, would you choose a different city in the experiment above or the same one? If the answer is the same, then you understand how you are entirely locked into your choice by the sum of all your prior experiences and preferences.
If the answer is different, then there must be a variable that changed, and this new variable is a new cause. You are thus replacing one cause for another, but still tied to a prior cause. And if you assume your answer could be different because it may be entirely random, then you are still left void of freedom.
What is Human Choice?
When you follow the logic, choice falls entirely within the confines of one or more of three distinct elements, none of which allow for free will:
1 – the influence of prior causes
2 – external influences
3 – randomness
What part of choice falls outside of any of these? It is difficult to accept, but in any given moment, you have no control over what you will choose next.
Even if you stop reading at this moment and walk away in disgust, this is a choice that is the result of preexisting preferences and biases that elicit emotions with regard to the topic. You did not consciously choose to like or dislike this any more than you consciously chose to like or dislike a particular food.
And if you still don’t agree, imagine that you lived your entire life over again up to this very moment. Would you possibly feel any different?”
Recent Comments