Yes. Do physical damage to the brain and the abstract thinking (along with other kinds) dissapears.
It's clear that the brain is intimately involved in the expression of consciousness. But whether it's the source is really a question outside science. For example, it's role could also be analogous to a radio. Damage the radio and there goes the beautiful music. But seeing the radio as the source would be kinda missing the whole point, wouldn't it?
There is clearly an interaction between consciousness and physics; a simple proof is that we are now talking about consciousness (its existence somehow loops back into the physical world). Therefore, consciousness should be definitely part of science.
Most often I see the radio metaphor invoked in a vaguely mystical way, where the signal of consciousness is supposed to emanate from some totally unknown background source that nobody has any idea at all what it might be, except some people choose to call it "God." All that stuff is totally non-scientific until someone comes up with a clear hypothesis.
What happens when the science will eventually come up with technology to recreate (by all external empirical evidence) a human consciousness? Would you still say it's a "question outside science"? Then perhaps you can still claim that even the newely created mind inside a machine is also just a "radio" receiving the consciousness signals from the cosmos? Even so, of course noone can stop you from looking at things from that perspective, but then you can perhaps just look at the practical applications of understand exactly how such "radios" work and being able to have a technology which will in all external observable regards act as a human (even if you still perhaps won't believe it will have the same "real" type of consciousness as one).
The peculiar thing about this question is that normally people who don't understand some advanced science (like automobiles or computing or radio, etc.) - don't actively express a will to keep others from studying and developing that science. There are billions who don't understand all the intricacies of a modern smartphone, but almost none of them (minus the religious fanatics) say things like "humans should not try to find this out", "that is not a question for science", "you will never be able to understand that", "herecy!", etc.
And yet, when it comes to the science of consciousness, the mind, human cognition, artificial intelligence etc - we hear these voices all the time. "Stop studying the brain", "science can't help", "we'll never understand the mind", "it's above our abilities", etc. etc.
Latest years have shown a tremendous progress in understanding and recreating parts of human intelligence. The task is huge and a lot is left to do, but every new understanding or technology clearly shows a pattern that we are getting close to it. And yet no matter how much "evidence" (in form of recreating) comes up, people still seem to feel unsettled that the science tries (and slowly succeeds) to understand the human mind.
Having talked to many of these people it almost seems like they have a fear, a deep rooted fear of being a "machine" themselves. Somehow if they know that there is someone who understands how they work (and can recreate them), they feel like that diminishes their value, or perhaps removes their "soul" somehow? Well it doesn't. No amount of technical understanding and technological will abilities will diminish any subjective religious and other deep experiences. Because that's what they are: subjective.
> But seeing the radio as the source would be kinda missing the whole point, wouldn't it?
What point are these scientists missing? They are simply trying to create Strong AI. There is no "point" to this besides the technology itself.
Sorry if anyone is upset, I'm just trying to understand the objection here. The scientists are clearly doing great and useful work, why would anyone think that they are wrong in doing that?
As to the question of the soul - sure there exist religious people who fear that science might demystify something they think should stay mysterious.
But the fact that such people exist doesn't strengthen the argument that consciousness is just a product of a certain kind of machine.
That may yet turn out to be true, but it is simply an unproven assertion at this time. It is attractive to pursue it because we have been successful at using machines to simulate other physical phenomena.
There is zero evidence that we are close to producing consciousness in machines. We have plenty of examples of simulating independent information processing functions that are adaptive to their inputs in ways that are analogous to the brain.
To assert that this indicates that we are getting close to reproducing consciousness is to affirm the consequent - that consciousness is just a paricular kind of algorithm. That's not scientific either.
The radio analogy can't be dismissed so easily by resorting to straw men. It doesn't imply a mystical source. It simply implies that consciousness is not located in the brain. One simple non-mystical explanation for this is that consciousness is a social phenomenon.
If this turns out to be true, then it would change the nature of strong AI from a standalone 'consciousness' to something that can only exist as an extension of our collective consciousness. It also opens the door for AI to do harm to our collective consciousness even without a singularity-like self-improving AGI take off.
Machines are a metaphor. Biological processes approximate machines to the extent that we can develop machines that capture their behavior, but to date these are strictly limited.
> What happens when the science will eventually come up with technology to recreate (by all external empirical evidence) a human consciousness? Would you still say it's a "question outside science"? Your question already presupposes that this will be possible. To you, it’s a question of “when” not of “if”. Your argument for that is the progress we’ve lately seen in AI. To me, and many others, this is like somebody saying that they’re closer to flying because he climbed a hill taller than others.
But even assuming that this will have happened, does this mean that we’re machines and nothing more? Or that we’ve just fooled ourselves with a clever contraption? I know it’s frustrating, and many people want to swipe this under the rug, but it’s clear we still won’t know for sure.
This is an important point, but I don't think the best course of action is to mark consciousness as something that lies outside the scope of science. I certainly think that there are some broader problems to be solved which involve how one deals with investigation into a domain that appears to be reflexive. "Consciousness" is a valid domain of investigation, but the question to ask becomes "Can we come to an agreement over how to distinguish what we are investigating?" Additionally, can we really call consciousness an "object" of investigation? The problem is that we, the subject, are investigating an object, which is us, the subject. It seems like there is some analogue of the subject-object problem that injects itself into the situation at that point.
The investigation of consciousness (among other things) becomes muddled when the majority of participants in the discourse can't stabilize on how to actually distinguish or demarcate consciousness as an object of investigation - that problem is tangled because the act of explaining consciousness presupposes consciousness.
Similarly, we must use the condition of living in order to explain life, and we must use the condition of "being embedded in language" in order to describe language. One cannot escape those systems in their attempts to describe them. A scientist's description of consciousness must necessarily account for the process by which he describes it.
But this isn't anything too radical or new. I'm not sure this means that it's something beyond the grasp of science.