Consciousness

[Diageo]

Well I thought since the conversation about consciousness was clogging up the "Can we make a difference" thread, and both conversations died down. I would make this new thread, to invigorate both.

 

So what do you make of consciousness? Is it your spirit or just your brain. Are the right and left side of your brain two sides of your consciousness, or two completely different consciousnesses?

 

Please discuss

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Interesting thread! Though I know nowhere near enough to actually add anything to this thread.

[Diageo]

Well what do you think consciousness is Danny?

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Well, as much as I am a sucker for paranormal stuff, I really don't believe in it. I'm scientific at heart. However, I do believe we still have lots to discover about the brain and consciousness in general, and I believe there are still groundbreaking discoveries to be made.

[Supergrunch]

Right/left is not as much a dichotomy as people tend to think, with lots of interaction between the two sides and lots of functions being carried out by both - I've made a post on this a while back I think.

 

As for conciousness, I'm kind of somewhere between eliminative materialism and it being something more emergent, though no idea what. I like concepts though. Concepts and modularity are good, even if they're just scaffolding for our understanding (which they may not be).

Edited September 6, 2010 by Supergrunch
Automerged Doublepost

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

As for conciousness, I'm kind of somewhere between eliminative materialism and it being something more emergent, though no idea what. I like concepts though. Concepts and modularity are good, even if they're just scaffolding for our understanding (which they may not be).

...

 

I have no idea what you just said.

[Diageo]

...

 

I have no idea what you just said.

 

Haha, I think i get some of it.

 

Both sides of the brain are not as separated as people think because there are many actions they do together and they have many connections.

 

Jibbertigoop... concepts are good to give us a picture to try and understand things, even if the images are not completely the same as the actual facts.

 

That's what I got.

[Supergrunch]

Lol, sorry about that, was in a bit of a rush. Eliminative materialism is basically the extreme view that any kind of folk concept of the mind or of mental states (like beliefs and desires and so on) is entirely mistaken, and that these things don't really exist. This applies to conciousness too, so an eliminative materialist would hold that there's no such thing as conciousness, and the only things we can truly analyse are those that are concrete, like the interactions between brain cells and so on. There's actually a field known as connectionism which computationally models the brain using neural networks of simple nodes, and these systems can be shown to exhibit various complex properties (such as language acquisition) without any need for higher level units such as concepts. So this would seem to support eliminative materialism, but the whole thing is a bit strong for me - for instance, I see no reason why neural networks shouldn't create higher level modular structures, much as computers are made up of simple logic gates that are into higher level systems. In terms of cognition, however, it may be that these modules merely need to be identified to aid our understanding and don't actually exist, but they may alternatively be a fundamental part of mental structure. And emergence is where more complex behaviour in some way arises from a simpler system - could that be going on here? Either way, I'm not sure where I stand on conciousness, but I think it's more complex than the eliminative materialist position suggests.

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Ah, now I get it. Very interesting. A very deep and complex debate as well, it would seem.