What is it about the brain that makes it the seat of consciousness? — RogueAI
In 1905, a French physician sought to find out. He attended an execution and stood close to the guillotine. He approached as soon as the severed head tumbled into the basket below and called out the man’s name.
He claimed the eyelids lifted and the man looked briefly at him before lowering his gaze. The physician called his name again and received a similar response. The man did not respond to a third prompt. The physician concluded based on his observations that a severed head could retain consciousness for 25 to 30 seconds.
If you mess with it, you mess with consciousness. If you were to separate the head from the body and do it in a way that kept giving oxygen to the head, it will eventually die, but still be conscious with the same feeling of paralyzation from the neck down.
So far we've only asked a few short lived heads: — Christoffer
Yes, I understand that, but what is is about brains that makes them conscious? There must be something about brains that makes them necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. What makes brains so special? — RogueAI
FYI, in Terrence Deacon's book Incomplete Nature, he discusses Emergence and Downward Causation. He explains, "downward causation . . . is in this sense not causation in the sense of being induced to change . . . but is rather an alteration in causal probabilities". He also says, "supervenience is in many respects the defining property of emergence, but also the source of many of its conceptual problems".However,there is also such a thing as top-down causation which mitigates against purely physicalist explanations of consciousness. — Wayfarer
Yes, I understand that, but what is is about brains that makes them conscious? There must be something about brains that makes them necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness. What makes brains so special? — RogueAI
the evolutionary necessity can simply be boiled down and explained through the human species starting with the evolutionary trait of adaptability, the need for it. Humans are highly adaptable in nature when speaking of only our basic body functions. Adaptability is an extremely powerful evolutionary trait, especially for animals that move over large distances and climates. It is not far fetched that the whole reason we developed our level of consciousness is due to this adaptability, a function that makes us able to plan and change behaviors according to the environment. This increase in complexity developed through evolution would then, just like other emergent systems of high complexities, produce new functions that weren't part of the intended simple function. That in order to be adaptable, we developed systems to recognize, memorize and formulate visualized scenarios in order to be able to plan our next moves. These systems together would be able to produce a new level of complexity which may be the reason why subjectivity occurs. — Christoffer
Plate class macroscopic properties supervene on chemical structure level properties. — fdrake
I guess strictly speaking all the events at moment 12:00 could supervene on the set of events at 11:59. If you think of classes of events and objects as properties of the stratum of events and objects which exist at a moment, you would get collections at 12:00 only changing if collections at 11:59 had changed. So assuming the collections are properties, I think that follows.
But there is something a bit iffy in taking those properties to be extensional? As in, the macroscopic properties of the plate seem specified by understanding a (defining?) intension toward it as a macroscopic object; manipulability, colour, texture... On the level of configurations of atoms and structure. Whereas the "structure" of a moment is just that it is an index. — fdrake
We do not yet know if it is impossible to predict or merely that the prediction is too complex for us to compute it. If it were, would that then be an explanation? — Christoffer
It only becomes a description if we can conclude it fundamentally impossible to be predicted. — Christoffer
Our consciousness might be the most complex emergent property in nature, when only looking at it in comparison to others, but we're also just a last point in a gradient of intelligence among animals. — Christoffer
So far we've only asked a few short lived heads: — Christoffer
The problem is not in finding examples of phenomena that might exhibit emergence. There are plenty of those. It's in framing what emergence is in a way that meshes with the overall ontology (which would generally be physicalism since the overwhelming amount of work on emergence is in that context).
The blocks example is about our intuition — a metaphor. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But this is magical thinking. You'd have to ask yourself the question: how, precisely, does the mere addition of more of the same pipes, valves and water, lead to the magical jump to conscious inner life? Unless you have an explicit and coherent answer to this question, you are merely engaging in hand waving, self-deception, and hiding behind vague complexity." — RogueAI
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