I’m not familiar with the studies, but I think we will almost always have an answer available as to why we do or say something we can both choose and consciously verify, unless it’s obviously contrary to our self-identity. Whether the reason presented is true or not is inconsequential - our conceptual structures don’t allow us to come up blank on this. So the most probable answer given the information available will do.

The qualitative actions we determine and initiate without conscious deliberation don’t require certainty or logic. They’re probabilistically determined based on an ongoing prediction of attention and effort (from our conceptual reality) in relation to an ongoing interoception of affect. If you put time pressure on the subject to think of an animal, their momentary attention directed towards the subliminal animal image will be enough to feature in the limited amount of information they can access in that time, despite being insufficient to feature in apperception.

When the subject goes back to explain their choice, they have time to draw from a larger bank of information to sufficiently bolster the rationality of their choice, and will actively seek only data that supports it. They may have matching visual data without sufficient temporal orientation, and may be confident the image wasn’t viewed today or even yesterday, but less confident that it wasn’t viewed in previous days. All of this fuzziness helps to support a sufficiently reasonable explanation.

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s meta-analyses of psychology/neuroscience research in relation to constructed emotion concepts supports this.

There are only a handful of animals any single person is familiar with and presumably the same animals will be part of the list of flashcards in the experiment. Surely, the experiment will always result in a positive correlation between the subject and the flashcards.

I guess what I'm saying is if you display all the animals an average person is generally familiar with, for certain the animal the subject thinks of will appear in the set of images displayed.

Did the experimenters include exotic animals, insects, birds, animals that people generally have never encountered in their lives, even on TV?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli

I find my explanation better. Why not do the experiment with other kinds of object, not just animals. I'm sure that would produce negative results.

Are you familiar with the study that John Lorber conducted?

Anyway, if large such experiments do exist just as here explained, what do you make of them? — Gregory

Well for starters I would like to point out that:

Basically the experiments flashed images of animals in front of people at a speed they could not consciously process. — Gregory

However each time they were asked why they named that particular animal they said "because I saw a picture of it the other day" or something and very seldom said "i don't know". — Gregory

...these two things seem to conflict.

Unfortunately, the friend who told me about these types of studies got addicted to Fentanyl last year and it's likely he's dead. I haven't heard from him in awhile. But he was smart and always represented what he read in science fairly. Sam Harris mentions these types of studies at the end of this short video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXTEmu-jUqA

People, just as they feel like they have complete free will, also feel like they know what exactly why they are recallingideas. However,

these two things seem to conflict. — InPitzotl

if the researcher flashes the picture of a chicken and the person immediately says "chicken", the researcher's gonna think it's just because of the picture he sent to the subjects mind. But the subject has a subjective reason as to why he said chicken. Now maybe they are not contradictory. Maybe the signal made the subject's brain think of chicken and in the subjects mind he remembered something about chickens and believes this alone was the reason. However, they are becoming very sophisticated in science where they can tease out these factors and know when something is known (by the subject) subconsciously only and when it's in the conscious mind

The qualitative actions we determine and initiate without conscious deliberation don’t require certainty or logic. They’re probabilistically determined based on an ongoing prediction of attention and effort (from our conceptual reality) in relation to an ongoing interoception of affect. — Possibility

Yes

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s meta-analyses of psychology/neuroscience research in relation to constructed emotion concepts supports this. — Possibility

Good, more information. My friend had said that the object of the study was to prove that people fool themselves all the f-ing time about what they REALLY think.

Did the experimenters include exotic animals, insects, birds, animals that people generally have never encountered in their lives, even on TV? — TheMadFool

You're right, the study would have to be very controlled. How much we fool ourselves is something psychology maybe, perhaps, be able to answer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subliminal_stimuli — unenlightened

Ah, thank you

Are you familiar with the study that John Lorber conducted? — Dharmi

Not yet, but I will look it up. Thanks

Not yet, but I will look it up. Thanks — Gregory

It's decisive proof against the idea that brain creates consciousness. Since the folks involved had no brain hemispheres, or were missing massive volume of their brain hemisphere, yet were fully conscious and had intelligence. Many were even students at university.

Is not "where consciousness is located" a debated question?

I don't think so. I think that experiment has decisively debunked the idea that consciousness is located in the brain. If there's no brain, how could consciousness be in the brain? It could be elsewhere in the body, but I think that's, just as Neil Degrasse Tyson put it, "an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on."

Consciousness is not in the body. It might still be material, somehow, like some sort of quantum wave or something, but I firmly believe it is immaterial.

Consciousness is fundamental, materiality is not. As Plato says.

It seems there are two things to be troubled about for your average self-styled "rational" philosopher. The first is the subliminal and therefore unconscious influence, that worried television executives and gave advertising execs a hard-on, back in the day. The other is called 'confabulation', which is the tendency of self-styled "rational" philosophers to make up reasons why they did things after the event, rather than admit that they do stuff without knowing why.

It's decisive proof against the idea that brain creates consciousness. Since the folks involved had no brain hemispheres, or were missing massive volume of their brain hemisphere, yet were fully conscious and had intelligence. Many were even students at university. — Dharmi

You can't just make this shit up. If you want to discuss philosophy, discuss philosophy, but I get really pissed off when folks start discussing empirical matters as if they could just stick a finger in the air and take a guess.

Lorber's patients did not have 'no brain' they had between 80% and 5% brain capacity according to his measurements, which were never verified. Hydrocephalus usually results in sever mental incapacity, in cases where it doesn't the reasons may be linked to the survival of glial cells, or to do with the condensing of scale-free neural networks in surviving brain structures. Lack on one-to-one mapping between neurons and their effects. The paper is here

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571441/

It has absolutely fuck all to do with proving consciousness is not created by the brain.

LOL Right, here we go. Materialists reinterpreting scientific evidence to fit their false paradigm. Go ahead and believe what you want to believe.

Lorber's patients either had no brains, or impaired hemispheres. That severely lowers the probability that brain produces consciousness.

It doesn't matter what "usually" happens with hydroencephaly. Lorber showed that many normal people have it, and they have no mental impairments.

Lorber's patients either had no brains — Dharmi

None of Lorber's patients had no brains.

That severely lowers the probability that brain produces consciousness. — Dharmi

So not

decisively debunked — Dharmi

then.

And how exactly does it lower the probability? If have a smaller car than usual does that lower the probability that cars facilitate transportation? What exactly does size have to do with the probability that an organ produces any given phenomena?

None of Lorber's patients had no brains. — Isaac

Are you really going to argue that a brain stem without a cortex or hemispheres is a brain?

You're free to do that, but that's very reaching.

You're free to believe your dogmatic worldview. I won't tell you not to.

The immaterial is not supernatural (grace). These are different experiences. The former is akin to experiences on shrooms. As for the brain (which it might all come from) if you have a brain stem and some other cerebral activity you can have consciousness. Fish and reptiles only have brain stems basically. A fish (interestingly) is older than the dinosaurs and reptiles are a type of dinosaur.

I think Sam Harris's point was that people had pre-coffee thoughts as to how to be friendly and the coffee kicked these thoughts into gear

Any experiment that tries to show that you didn't do what you did because of what you consciously thought was the subjective cause would have to be very intricate

Actually, I think dinosaurs were reptilian birds

This is just a way of finding an "ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance." Finding excuses after excuses in order to deny what the actual state of affairs is.

It's not any different than the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

Some comments:

The subtle body is alleged to have a chakra which is above the head like a halo. Does it originate from the pineal gland like daytime dream sequences? I don't know if any type of experiment that could prove this. Science has assumptions and it's first assumption is "assume it's material unless proven otherwise"

Science not only assumes that matter must exist, but puts our species on the same level as others and does not judge (yet) which has the greatest awareness. The answer could be a bee, therefore if our consciousness reduces to the same exact number of firings a bee has, we might find the greatest level of awareness

Lorber’s studies demonstrate degeneracy in the brain - the highly adaptable quality of neuronal structures that enable the brain to redirect and reassign functionality to regain efficiency and effectiveness. Sam Harris also cites studies demonstrating that consciousness is a whole system process that has no specific location in the brain in his book ‘Waking Up’, but to interpret these studies to mean that the brain is unnecessary for consciousness is to stretch the evidence waaayy too far to support your assumption.

More interesting studies about degeneracy in the brain can be found in Norman Doidge’s book ‘The Brain That Changes Itself’.

I don’t consider myself a materialist, but I am convinced that human consciousness as such is contingent upon a self-organising relational structure between variable ongoing events occurring amongst organic systems. I think we commonly overlook the ‘variable ongoing events’ part of this structure, and tend to view a living organism as a singular event. This singular event is consciousness, but Feldman Barrett argues that it is manifest in an interaction between two internally constructed events - interoception and conception - in a predictive system. In the same way that DNA interacts with chemical variability in a living organism to manifest mRNA instructions, our conceptual system interacts with the variable interoception of affect in a conscious organism to manifest an ongoing predictive instruction of distributed attention and effort.

Consciousness, therefore, has a four-dimensional (meta)physical structure - its location in spacetime is probabilistically determined at best, but just because we can’t definitively locate it, does not mean it isn’t there. Incidentally, the self-consciousness of the human mind is a five-dimensional (meta)physical structure that enables me to differentiate my consciousness from yours, but that’s another discussion, I think.

No, science doesn't assume matter exists. Metaphysics is not the domain of science.

Science assumes "identical OBJECTS act identically in identical situations", not that "ideas" or "blank" act in this way. That's how they are able to do physics at all. They recognize what matter IS ( "esse")

Yeah? So? Ideas operate regularly too, they partake of an eternal unchanging Form, of course they would operate regularly.

I guess

Sam Harris mentions these types of studies at the end of this short video: — Gregory

I think you have the wrong video... I've played through this and there didn't seem to be any references to such experiments in them.

People, just as they feel like they have complete free will, also feel like they know what exactly why they are recalling ideas. However, — Gregory

But the conflict that I'm seeing has nothing to do with a feeling of complete free will, or feeling of knowing why exactly we do things. There were two statements that I quoted. The first claimed that the images were being flashed too quickly for subjects to consciously process. But in the second, the subjects correctly report their motivation of naming that animal as being based on seeing an image of the animal. (Mind you, they incorrectly report the time, but you're not claiming for example that they remember eating chicken last night, or reading about chickens, or watching cartoons about chickens, or having a pet chicken when they were little, or any of a number of alternate potential triggers).

Maybe the signal made the subject's brain think of chicken and in the subjects mind he remembered something about chickens and believes this alone was the reason. — Gregory

This does not explain why the subject's report is of seeing an image of the chicken.

However, they are becoming very sophisticated in science where they can tease out these factors and know when something is known (by the subject) subconsciously only and when it's in the conscious mind — Gregory

The conflict I see gives some reason to doubt this very thing. Whatever speed these subjects were flashed those images, it was apparently sufficient enough for them to self report seeing images.

Minute 5 to 7. People seem to make up stories as to why they do things and "believe their own shit" so to speak. Since no one so far has referenced studies in this area, it IS hard to discuss this further
nonetheless.

People seem to make up stories as to why they do things and "believe their own shit" so to speak. — Gregory

I think we're talking about different things then. Or not. In your reporting of these experiments, people are confabulating. It's completely untrue that they saw the image "yesterday"; rather, they saw the image moments ago. But what appears to be true is that they were influenced by seeing an image, and their self report of why contains the account of seeing an image.

Since no one so far has referenced studies in this area, it IS hard to discuss this further nonetheless. — Gregory

Yes; it would be interesting to see the studies. I'm solely describing the report you have given; if you run across particular citations of the experiments I'll be interested (though reserve the right not to comment).