What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain?
frontiersin.org
frontiersin.org
If consciousness is not emergent of brain matter, the hop to non-physical is very short.
It's difficult for me to view Edgar Mitchell as some lucky pseudoscientific vagabond who by luck happened to hitch a ride to the moon and return with a buch of dumb ideas.
A minor adjustment to your chosen terminology could exalt at least one of the listed pseudo topics into an actual scientific one by replacing "psychic abilities" with PSI. From my experience, those with the most hostile sentiment for that particular subject have the least awareness of it beyond the standard James Randy, ie spoon bender stuff. Admittedly, telekinesis is tempting to berate, but not so much with telepathy.
It's a stretch, perhaps trite to say, but hand-washing was not long ago considered alternative medicine.
When two active entities previously running in unsynchronized simulations get close enough that their simulations have to sync, there can be artifacts as they sync up. Those should be noticeable. Some of the larger virtual world systems actually have that problem.
But this is all probably bogus. There's a lot of wishful "consciousness must be special so that humans are important" in this line of thinking.
As I point out occasionally, the place where AI does badly is not around "consciousness", whatever that is. It's around common sense and manipulation in unstructured situations. Or, as I like to put it, not screwing up in the next 30 seconds. Recently someone commented on here that octopi have those abilities. They're good at figuring out their environment, learn from others of their own kind, and are good at escaping. They're at least at dog level. Octopi are interesting because they are a separate evolution from mammals, with a much more distributed brain and a completely different vision system. This tells us there's more than one way to do it.
OK, how much RAM and Energy did your PC consume to send this text, versus the 10 Chrome tab Virtual Machines, 20 svchost processes, Windows Defender scanning for malware.... How many predictive branch instructions does your CPU errantly run, and discard, every hour? How many of your thoughts contribute positively to the external or internal environment? How many in-fighting cells and viruses in yoir body contribute to you as a Person?
And yet, what effort would it take to re-design Everything to completely avoid Parasitic Events?
If the Greys spin up Universes and Conscious Agents to stab at un-solvable problem, I'd wager they need those Systems to be Realistic, not Efficient
(Just sci-fying here please don’t get these details serious)
Not all things seem to necessarily have a location in space. For example, where is the color red, or where is “red-ness”? I’m not talking about light waves radiating at a certain frequency but rather the experience of red we have in our minds. Plato gets at this concept with his ideal forms, which transcend space and time, yet can be “materialized” within space and time as matter and observed by consciousness. In other words, there is no difference between “red-ness” and the experience of “red-ness” we have in our minds, rather they are one in the same. Yes, there may be interference with our perception of the ideal form e.g. color blindness, or other impairments analogous to a radio with a damaged antenna. However it’s still plausible that there is a transcendent form that exists independent of space and time, yet which is accessible within space time via the organs of consciousness we experience as matter.
Anyway, just some musings, but I have found that ancient metaphysics are not incompatible with modern physics. It gets interesting because if you accept the metaphysics about “red-ness”, then you can extend this line of thought more broadly to concepts like “good-ness”, and what is the good, and how we could possibly know this.
We could even be bipolar, where perhaps the chemicals transition so fast that we can be in a good mood one moment and bad the next.
Our consciousness, and reality is painted by our experiences, and our feelings and we cannot separate feelings easily from conscious thought, perhaps with deep meditation and then only for a time. Other things in our body contribute also to our awareness/experience: Pain/pleasure signals, sight, sound and other senses, proprioception, random thoughts, inner monologues (or lack thereof - some people have on inner voice), and then there's the brain itself which can have physical impairments or just differences in how one thinks or experiences the world based on how big one section of the brain is.
There's also brain matter inside the intestines, and its possible some part of our consciousness is derived from that, but our total 'self' or 'ego' ... that is a system that encompasses the 'current state' of all the tangentially related things. All those hormones, sensors, etc. Ego is only a state, and it's one that exists in the now. It's hard to quantify because every moment we're a new person than we were before, with a lilttle less, or a little more dopamine, or seratonin, right now i'm getting bored of this topic, 5 minutes ago I was fascinated enough to spend 5-10 mins on a comment...
Excited me 5 mins ago vs bored me now are two separate conscious experiences about the same topic/event from the same being but over different time scales and only minutes at that.
There's also possibility that there could be some psycho extra-cellular stuff going on, or subatomical stuff we don't know about that perhaps our entire 'energy' around our body could form a 'soul' per se, or if we're in a simulation then our body doesn't even exist and our 'conciousness' or awareness really is the only thing we are, and our body is just a manifestation we created to make ourselves feel real.
One thing i found weird as an agnostic is energy. If you make an energy ball in your hands, you can shape it, and feel it and focus on it. Maybe focus some breathing into growing it... eventually it's the size of a basketball and the more you do this the more solid it feels, is it real, or is it imagined? Did I really create an energy ball? It feels as real as a real ball, when I run it over my arm the hairs standup like if it were a balloon with static electricity.
I have a feeling we may never know what consciousness really is, I hope it lives on though, it'd be a shame if it doesn't, even though I don't believe in a higher 'being' I believe in energy that is part of consciousness being able to move beyond the physical being.
Consciousness isn't magic, it's metacognition. It's thinking about thinking. You have a finite (and not allways constant) amount of layers of recursion to your metacognition and you can hack symbolic representation to get nigh infinite recursion for very specific cases. Other animals (and likely some computational processes) have a nonzero amount consciousness. It's unlikely we will be able to quantize it anytime soon.
Artificial Consciousness isn't a thing because consciousness only makes for less efficient machine slave labor, it's the quality of humans we are making computers to actively avoid dealing with. Why, other than unwisely funded hubris and ego, would anybody try to make it?
Half of people talking about consciousness are not talking about that at all. They would call that self-consciousness or reflective consciousness. That is about what someone is experiencing. What many people are talking about is why someone (a material object) is experiencing anything at all.
I tend to use consciousness as the same as awareness really. Being awake and experiencing. This is where qualia are found, and is something I readily ascribe to most if not all animals, and even possibly other living things.
I find the term self consciousness meaning meta cognition to be problematic, as many animals are aware of themselves as beings (e.g. recognise that a reflection is them). I don't think they can reflect on that much though.
We support much higher levels of abstraction in thinking than other animals, and we can reflect on our own thoughts, including our self in that model. These are cognitive skills rather than being about awareness.
I would say that an artificial intelligence can possess deep cognitive skills but have no awareness at all. Although it could have that too - I just don't see that as a requirement.
It seems one of the most comprehensive theories that I've come across, although I'm only an interested layperson.
I think 'appears' is the important caveat, IMHO.
Our brains are quantum computers (without qubits, it is quantum holography.)
The illusion of singular consciousness in our minds is the product of so many individual neurons entangling and coupling.
It is existential reality which is consciousness (the universe peering back upon itself.) Our brains and bodies are merely the jellybags which keep the electrochemical animation stable, as well as providing sensors and actuators for interacting with our environments.
Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it doesn’t mitigate uncertainty it isn’t intelligence.
Consciousness is not intelligent. Consciousness co-opts intelligence as a tool for survival, and intelligence co-opts consciousness as a memetic host.
The most common one is probably knowing someone else has recently died, due to encountering the newly-dead in the apparent afterlife part of their NDE.
Could that still suffer from the same selection bias problem? Sure.
Do we have rigorous proof that this really happens as such? No, just various eyewitness testimonies saying that it did, and eyewitness testimony is famously unreliable.
Still - if people really do come back from near-death and spontaneously report other deaths accurately without first checking for whether their perception was correct... that's kind of weird.
Bruce Greyson apparently published a paper about the phenomenon, IIRC saying that they didn't find any instances of someone reporting a death incorrectly out of hundreds of reports of NDE-inspired death-knowledge claims. I've been meaning to dig that one up and look more closely at it, because that's at the very least pretty remarkable selection bias. Not sure I'm remembering the details right, though.
This is literally unbelievable. If what you're saying is true, it would be published in something like "Nature" or "Science". Please point to that paper. If it's not published in a journal of that prestige level, then it's certainly factually wrong.
"If the Earth revolved around the Sun surely the Church would have published Copernicus' work."
I don't disagree with your conclusion, just your method of reaching it.