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What is conciousness? Science is able to explain a lot of things in life. For example, we might think of thoughts as not existing in the physical world, that they are in some other "spiritual" domain. Yet we can view these thoughts as electrical activity within the brain using EEG or some other means. I don't see how we can do this with conciousness though. This may or may not be related, but I find it strange that I as an individual have a "first-person" view of the world. I understand that my brain is made up of many neurons or some other soykaf that talk to each other with chemical and electrical impulses. But how does that come together and produce the overall sense of self that I feel? From my point of view, you could tell me that my brain was made of a computer and some software and I could believe you if I did not know otherwise; I certainly do not feel like a bunch of neurons talking to each other. Do you believe in the concept of a "soul" or of some part of us existing in a separate "spiritual domain"? The rational part of me says that it's just religious bullsoykaf, yet it would go some way in explaining how a "sense of self" works. Also all the media I consume keeps presenting it as a fact e.g. Ghost in the Shell has a separate soul (ghost) from the body (shell).

I don't think it's that complicated. You're not in the connections, you are the information being encoded in those connections. You have an interface to reality, which is a physical body.

The problem with trying to describe consciousness is that people are usually trying to work off an incorrect model of how we experience reality. Consciousness and the idea of self as we usually think of them are a bit of a paradox if you look at it closely because of 2 things. 1) We as conscious beings exist EXCLUSIVELY across time. It takes time to react to things, for thoughts to form, for associations to be made. If time is not moving we do not have any kind of awareness, processing of information can only occur as time moves forward. 2) No part of us actually exists across time. Tangent time! Ever heard of something called Last Thursdayism? It's the idea that the entire universe was created last Thursday but in such a way that it would be identical to a universe that had existed naturally up to that point. It is a classical example of a ridiculous claim that is totally impossible to disprove. The reason for this is that no evidence from the present can be used to disprove the claim because in the present there are no differences between the two universes. This sort of illustrates the problem here. Everything we are exists exclusively in the infinitely narrow instant which is the present, not a nanosecond in either direction. Memories of the past are not magical portals through time, the memories you are using right now exist RIGHT NOW as physical neural connections in your scull and they are subject to change and degradation over time. Going back to Last Thursdayism, it doesn't have to be last Thursday, it could be a day ago, an hour ago, a second ago. Perhaps you never actually read the first part of this post. To exist in your present state you don't actually need a past, just the appearance of one. Similarly, you don't need a future, the entire universe could poof out of existence 10 seconds from now and it would not affect you at all in this moment. A universe with the appearance of existing for billions of years could be created and then destroyed a moment later and the experience of all those in that universe in that moment would be indistinguishable from those where the universe had existed for billions of years and would continue to exist for billions more. Because of this, we can say that different moments of our existence are not intrinsically connected because the actual past does not matter when experiencing the present, only the appearance of the past. It's best to think about consciousness in a state based model. You exist now in one state and that state is everything you are. As time moves forward that state will change and you will be different. Because these states are not intrinsically connected across time there really aren't any rules about what constitutes a valid state transition in term of the continuation of "you". Do transporters in Star Trek kill the person and make some sort of weird clone on the other side? Sure, but it's not inherently different to any other moment of existence. What if there's an error and what comes out the other side is totally different than what went in? No difference, still totally valid. You could take this to mean that every new moment is the equivalent of death and that existence is a cruel joke. Or could just drink. That's what I do.

I think the sense of self in particular has to do with an internal model of the world contrasting with external stimuli. The discrepencies require the mind to explain things to itself and you end up with a sort of inner monologue type thing.

Here is "my" opinion. It's not really mine I stole it. We are in a sense. The system isn't the sum of the parts, it's a bit more than that. It is an impossible effort to look at ourselves and tell us what is this sense of "I" without looking at the whole thing. However the thinking individual is just a part of his conscious whole and the minute we try and break it down we lose site of it all. You just have to accept you are conscious as you accept the sky is blue, and the concept of a beginning or end to it is just us "breaking it down". A conscious has no beginning or end perhaps, a dream can feel like an eternity, so does dying perhaps and who knows about birth. We use tests like the mirror, but if something has this view it won't go "thats me", it just knows who it is, why would they be in the mirror. It's also important to maybe realize that how we think has nothing to do with consciousness. Further being self aware of your consciousness is not consciousness, its just being self aware and its somewhat of a falsehood I think. You are looking for some "thing" that isnt there or a "thing" or you could say you are that "thing". We aren't really self aware, we just have this abstract idea of consciousness that we believe to be true but we don't even understand what it is, how can we attatch something to ourselves and say "we are conscious" when we don't even know what the word means fully. The sense of being "I"? What is that? Again it comes down to, you just know you are and it's always been that way.

>>2288 You should try and read something about gestalt psychology. Not that it deals with the issue of dualism or monism, but it has an explanation that worked to for me. Essentially, the recollection of all parts of a whole does not make a whole. Your brain might just be a chemically powered computer, but emotions are real and it has been proven in recent years that emotions actually affect the brain structure. You are not conscious of the electrical impulses going on in your brain, you are not aware of the thought processes, you are not aware of ignoring other sources of information that are attacking your from all sides while reading this. If you are interested in the idea of the conscious and unconscious, try reading Jung, Freud, Adler or any other psychoanalysts. If you are interested in the idea of monism or dualism(body and soul are either 2 or 1), try philosophy, ancient philosophers asked themselves these questions.

Sorry to crush your fantasy, but it's just 100 billion neurons. It's a huge number. The human mind isn't spiritual. Our minds are always active. It's a synthesized operating system thingie, except very dynamic . . . unlike current processors with op instructions. It's a twisted beeping server closet, with a bunch of glowing buttons.

>>2288 http://barabasi.com/networksciencebook/chapter/2#networks-graphs https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2012.00163/full https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjwKgpQ-l1s The brain can likely best be described as a network operating at or very near criticality. That is, it is a network or collection of networks constantly on the edge of one or multiple phase changes in the flow of electrochemical information through it/them. It has been shown that systems at criticality display interesting properties and increased potential for complex behavior with and without stimuli. This concept is an emerging theory in neuroscience that has not yet hit the computational side or mainstream yet. In essence, your "consciousness" is a continuous stream of dynamic network states in a critical network in response to a collection of stimuli from both your senses and the internal self stimulating feedback loops of your "thoughts" and "memories" and "attention". The actual process is a bit complicated and jargony, so I have used simple terms in quotes that refer to much more complex network dynamics we often mistake for concrete processes or stable long term storage systems.

>>4347 In response to my last post, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory http://integratedinformationtheory.org/ http://www.architalbiol.org/aib/article/viewFile/15056/23165867 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giulio_Tononi/publication/303551101_Integrated_information_theory_From_consciousness_to_its_physical_substrate/links/574f7f7a08aebb988044f5ba.pdf http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.2307/25470707 These are some papers that deal exclusively with the integrated information theory perspective on "conciousness" on "the self". Integrated information theory is heavily inter connected with network theory. Systems at criticality tend to maximize integrated information for their particular constituency. The brain is likely operating under principles like these, or perhaps, exactly as we are now describing it. Additionally, the breain would appear to be well modeled by a sparse small world network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17079517 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853440/ This provides strong connecting support for the other above theories of how the brain functions. http://prome.ai/ https://www.mindfire.global/ https://numenta.com/ In fact, there are already businesses cropping up around the concept. That is how far along these theories are. They are sufficiently well grounded to build businesses around. Further evidence can be found in an old project. http://openworm.org/ https://github.com/Connectome/GoPiGo one can certainly argue the "conciousness" of a simulated worm brain. But one can nary doubt its displayed autonomy and complex behaviors far removed from the relative simplicity of most hand coded robots.

Standard disclaimer that these are my ideas alone and much of the philosophical and scientific communities disagree with me. There's no consensus on the matter at all though. >I don't see how we can do this with conciousness though. We can't. It's a catch-22. Let's imagine we build a perfect consciousness measuring machine. Being good scientists we aren't just going to accept that it measures consciousness we have to test it. What could I use to verify the accuracy of the device's results? Usually for scientific measuring equipment this bottoms out at our natural senses (empirical means from the senses). I can use my eyes to test if a microscope or thermometer works and then those to measure less perceptible changes. I can even change track a little and start measuring things that only indirectly reach the senses. Like using my thermometer to measure the electrical charge in a wire. This makes a lot of sense. If something isn't perceptible, even indirectly, then we can't really study it. Maybe there is a giant invisible teapot orbiting earth. We can't know and so it's a boring question. The only reason consciousness is more interesting is that we have our own personal experience of it. Though all that hinges on the assumption that consciousness has no measurable effect. That two otherwise identical brains, one with a consciousness like mine and the other not (magically if need be. It's a thought experiment it doesn't have to be possible), would both display identical behaviour. >Do you believe in the concept of a "soul" I like the word soul. I think it does a decent job of quickly getting across what I mean when I say consciousness and I find, in the modern day, it shouldn't be taken to imply that the user has religious beliefs. >yet it would go some way in explaining how a "sense of self" works Only by passing the buck. Saying "it's a soul" gives a name to the mystery more than answers the question. We're still left utterly without explanation of what a soul is. >>2302 >>3887 >>4346 It's unfalsifiable but let's say I am information or a bunch of neurons or whatever. Why has that lead to awareness? These all have more explanatory power than "souls" but they still leave the big question unanswered. >>3888 >You just have to accept you are conscious as you accept the sky is blue I accept the sky is blue because I can see it. Likewise I accept consciousness because I experience it. Thing is we're looking not at the specifics of that experience but the fact that it exists at all. Cogito ergo sum. Something is going on. That's as much understanding of it as I need and it can't be a trick or misconception because they would imply that there's someone to fool and I'm only asserting the existence of this someone. >>4347 >>4348 This stuff is really interesting. I like that they're being specific about what assumptions they're making in order to get somewhere in a similar way to empiricism assuming that our eyes tell the truth.

>>4488 >Why has that lead to awareness? I'm >>3887 . I think this is all unfalsifiable but it's fun to think about. We start with some kind of computing machine. Like a p-zombie. All it does is follow some very complex, but set, algorithm. This p-zombie necessarily has a large amount of inaccurate inputs, and a similarly large amount of inaccurate outputs(it can take seconds for a message from the brain to reach your toes). So it's necessary, for this p-zombie to be effective, to try and error-correct all these inputs and outputs. In other words it is building an internal model of its world, operating on some similar(but not the same) set of rules and assumptions as the external world. Since the internal model will be wrong sometimes, and in some cases deviate wildly from observed inputs and outputs, it becomes advantageous to add *awareness of the model* to the model itself. This allows the p-zombie to adjust its behaviour based on the knowledge that its internal model may be wrong. I'd say, that this is equivalent to self-awareness, the basis of consciousness.