Science
Related: About this forumCould Consciousness All Come Down to the Way Things Vibrate?
By Tam Hunt, University of California, Santa Barbara | November 10, 2018 09:13am ET
Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium?
These questions are all aspects of the ancient "mind-body problem," which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It's resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.
The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades. Now it's generally known as the "hard problem" of consciousness, after philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic paper and further explored it in his 1996 book, "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory."
Chalmers thought the mind-body problem should be called "hard" in comparison to what, with tongue in cheek, he called the "easy" problems of neuroscience: How do neurons and the brain work at the physical level? Of course they're not actually easy at all. But his point was that they're relatively easy compared to the truly difficult problem of explaining how consciousness relates to matter.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/64057-consciousness-vibrations.html
dweller
(23,661 posts)and yes... or shines or feels or sounds or tastes or smells ...
yes and yes
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InAbLuEsTaTe
(24,122 posts)Some things may just not be knowable... perhaps, no amount of "science" can make up for the limits of our five senses, which give us the illusion of consciousness. Maybe we should just go with it and stop overthinking it. Maybe I am, therefore, I am.
qazplm135
(7,447 posts)pretty much render this in the unknowable realm.
Whether consciousness is real or an illusion, it ceases upon the expiration of the bag of meat that produces it.
We are a hybrid of the pattern and the machine, the latter makes the former.
MAYBE you can replicate that with enough information but it's only a copy, a twin, and the moment you start the copy, it starts getting experiences that shape it and change it from what came before.
Loki Liesmith
(4,602 posts)Its an interesting solution to the binding problem but is, unfortunately, untestable. Will remain one of the great speculations of neuroscience.
Loki Liesmith
(4,602 posts)This doesnt get us any closer to causality between matter and consciousness. It simply allows us a mechanism to bind features together into a single representation of an object. Why those features (qualia) exist at all is a mystery.
defacto7
(13,485 posts)They are one in the same. The rest is an illusion or confusion of senses.
In our need to make symmetry out of confusion we seem to forget that we're not perfect and we can't make the world around us complete. We also can't agree on what we perceive because of differing vantage points. That fuzzy incompleteness drives humans crazy and we fill it in with all sorts of irrational answers as well as irrational questions.
Mind is simply confusion vs. analysis within a continually evolving brain.