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Comment by arbre | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I have some meditation, observation of the mind and advaita/Zen practice.

If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively. The faces of your parents, your first girlfriend, your job, swimming, eating all sums up to senses which all appear in your mind/conciousness. So it is not only that conciousness exists, it is what everything you have ever known is made of. You can claim you experience something that is outside of you, but there is no proof for that. There will never be a proof. A proof would happen in your mind as well. The thoughts of 'outside of mind' will also happen in your mind. Based on experience conciousness is the only thing that really exists.

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> If you look at all your experience since you are born, it all happened in your mind, exclusively.

It happened in your brain. Whether it happened in your mind or even whether the mind exists is up for debate. As we learn more about the brain, the mind recedes and it may disappear altogether. Just like how our increased understanding of physiology ended any serious notion of the soul.

The issue of the mind suffers from the same problems that soul did. Can a soul get old? Of course not. Our bodies get old. Can the mind get drunk? Of course not, our brains get drunk. If you take psychotropic drugs, do these drugs target the mind or the brain? Obviously the brain.

Your concept of brain is happening in your mind right now. You think there is such a thing like a physical world and a brain but all that is really in your 'conciousness'. Can you feel electrical signals in your brain? Or can you feel senses in your conciousness?

> Your concept of brain is happening in your mind right now.

No. It's in my brain.

> Can you feel electrical signals in your brain? Or can you feel senses in your conciousness?

When people experience certain kinds of brain injury, they can lose their sense of smell, touch, etc. Some people with brain defects can't feel pain. But after surgery, if successful, these people can feel, sense, smell, touch, etc again.

I know for a certain that I can't feel without my brain. As for the mind? As I said, it's debatable.

Ultimately, we have to wait for brain science for our answer. We could sit here and debate forever, like I did in philosophy class. But that will get us nowhere. It will be like debating whether the soul exists in the liver or the pineal gland 300 years ago.

But I think all signs point to the mind going the way of the soul. At least that's what nascent advances in neuroscience and philosophical consensus is slowly heading towards.

The mind to the body is just like the soul to the body or the gods to the heavens. It's nonsense we invented to explain what we do not understand.

But only scientific advance can put this debate to rest.

It is not in your brain. Thinking "it's in my brain" happens in your awareness. You think that there is a brain and a body and a world but all these things show up in your awareness and never elsewhere. Look outside, where are the images? Where are the sounds? Where are the feelings? In your awareness. The feeling of 'something outside me' itself is in your awareness.

Where is your awareness? Can you locate it? No because it is always everything you feel. When you move and travel awareness doesn't move. It doesn't have a location or a size or any physical attributes. It is always one field representing all aspects of your life right now.

The brain has effects on the things that can show up in awareness, but not really on the experience of awareness itself. Awareness is always the simple direct experience of things (thoughts, images, sounds, body feelings). You might not get images or get modified thoughts when you have some brain diseases, but you are always this aware field of things appearing.

There's no understanding about how "it happens in the brain". Of course that supposition is the most reasonable one when we accept a materialistic paradigm. I don't discard any explanation, but I find it difficult to imagine how a material thing, the brain with its neurons and electric impulses and neurotransmiters, can be able to generate what philosophers of mind call qualia, which is something apparently non material.

I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where in my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?

> but I find it difficult to imagine how a material thing, the brain with its neurons and electric impulses and neurotransmiters, can be able to generate what philosophers of mind call qualia, which is something apparently non material.

There was a time when people said the same thing about the body. How can a slab of muscle and bones move? What is moving the body? Of course, it has to be a soul. The same thing with the heavens. Look at those magnificent planets and stars. Certainly gods must reside there and are moving them.

> I have an experience. How my brain/hardware causes the experience? Is the experience material? Perhaps. I wonder: how? e.g.: when I see a cup, where in my brain is the subjective experience of the cup? Is it coded as electric impulses? What decodes it and translates the impulses to qualia?

This is basic philosophy questions. It can't be answered by philosophy. It has to be answered by science ( neuroscience ).

Honestly, philosophically pondering about the brain/mind right now is akin to pondering about the gods/planets a few hundred years ago. Or philosophizing about where the soul reside in our body ( pineal gland? heart? liver? )

Now, we see how absurd those assumptions were because we advanced scientifically and we gained knowledge. I'm fairly certain the same will happen with the mind/brain questions.

All I know is that there is no "qualia" without the brain. Applying occam's razor, why do we need the mind? Other than as a crutch for our lack of understanding of the brain?

> There was a time when people said the same thing about the body.

Movement, electric impulses, nerves, are observable/measurable stuff. I'm not sure that your example is analogous to qualia. You suppose that qualia is material. It may be, still I find it very hard to imagine how it could be. What is our subjective experience made of? How electricity and neurotransmitters cause subjective experience? It appears that there's a gap between objects and qualia because only I can see my qualia, while everybody can see a brain or measure electric impulses.

Anyway, I like your hypothesis that it could be answered by science. It can lead to interesting experiments and theories.

> It appears that there's a gap between objects and qualia because only I can see my qualia, while everybody can see a brain or measure electric impulses.

That could be true. Or it could be true that you don't really exist and the subjective experience is an illusion. The subjective self seems to be just another iteration of the unique soul. The soul is what makes you you and the soul is why you experience things.

> Anyway, I like your hypothesis that it could be answered by science.

It's the only way we can settle things one way or the other. We can argue about gods on mount olympus til the cows come home. The only real way to be sure is to actually climb the mountain and see for ourselves.

My inclination at the moment is the mind is fiction. We no more have a "mind"( aka brain's soul ) than plants which move to capture more sunlight have a "mind".

We just have to patiently wait for science to advance to answer the mind/brain questions. In the meantime, it is fun to philosophize about it.

> Based on experience conciousness is the only thing that really exists.

I had to pay for my new car, though.

The thoughts to buy the car, the touch on your wallet, the images of your car, the sounds, all happened in consciousness.

Right, but I had to.

Well your awareness contains: beliefs you need a car, desires to do stuff with that car, concepts of money and bank account. It basically contains your life and is not incompatible with the fact of a life happening.

You can't prove it deductively. But you can build inductive evidence for the existence of things outside of yourself.

All that evidence appears in the mind and assumes conciousness is located in the brain, when our actual experience is that conciousness is just the container of everything and does not have a location. You can locate your brain but can you locate your conciousness? Everything you see or feel is in your conciousness right now, even the concepts of time and space. How could you conciousness have a position in space?

aka solipsism

... which is also a completely valid philosophical point of view! (And that is a problem with philosophy in general - unlike theories in the positive science, no philosophy is refutable.)

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