Vexcalibur wrote:
It is kind of silly to assume consciousness or "essence" can continue after death. When there are so many people for which it didn't really continue through life. Try any mental disease that affects a previously healthy brain. People are losing their personalities and memories and they seem to be pretty well-tied to a brain rather than something magical.
Hi Vexcalibur,
Maybe Quantum Conscious Holograms will be the next fad. The last I checked, the most concise articles on neural "networks & holographic thoughts/memories" were still those by Gloor. Papers included with "McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E." have many interesting entries too, including autism:
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~jlm/papers/Book searches for "McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E. holographic" are dated and/or replaced with newer phraseology.
Low-level "Electromagnetic" stimulation for equivalent medication effect is still sounding plausible too, but the need for any "Quantum Mechanics" for "consciousness" doesn't share a mutual realm of scales close enough to be much plausible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YPOTaUyvA0[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YPOTaUyvA0[/youtube]
Playing with "God Helmets" and crude modified MindFlex for eegs with thoughts is everything from boring, frightening, to fun.
shakitechnology-dot-com has much info, but goes for the product sell too.
"The attempt to experience 'nothingness' is best exemplified by Zen Buddhists when they meditate", but some Zen Buddhists neurologists recognize, and use the state as a model, from partial seizures of temporal lobe epilepsy, as explanations of the effects on "Zen Buddhists" meditating, with the "dirty" distinction of the not trying with seizures removing the "near perfection" targets. I often call it being Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin with the divine seizures.
The articles in one of my previous posts on consciousness are again often limited to the abstracts without payment:
Tadzio wrote:
abacacus wrote:
Saturn wrote:
abacacus wrote:
Consciousness is just matter anyway.
Well, in a sense. Conscious exists in our brains. Without a brain, a person has no conscious.
The brain is just a large, vastly more complicated nucleus. Our body is essentially one cell made up of billions of smaller cells.
But saying consciousness is just matter seems to collapse the meaning of the word 'matter' from something like 'stuff we can touch' to 'everything that exists'. If you want to have matter include consciousness then there is still something very puzzling about matter can have these 'touchable' properties as well as these experiential, perceiving, thinking and feeling etc. ones. If you want to say everything is matter, you might as well say everything is mind. There's just no distinction in the concepts that describes how things show up to us in the world in everyday experience. We generally and for the most part take ourselves to be having an experience of a material world. You know what I mean?
Let me rephrase that:
Consciousness is just a *function* of matter. Without the matter forming your brain, you (your conscious, personality, ideas, etc) would cease to exist. The mind requires the brain to function. We do not observe any sign of conscious in vacuum, or something without a brain (say, a rock).
Hi abacacus,
I'm more focused on prejudices involving epilepsy and autism, and the notions of "responsiveness" with "impaired consciousness". Otherwise, the radical Skinnerian Behaviourist vantage that "consciousness" is not a valid and objective scientific concept, is best entertained in pursuing the Scientific Method as applied to Human Behaviour, and it works best in philosophy too.
Daily activities are impacted, like driving and eye-contact, and very adverse prejudices are practiced against individuals with neurological impairments, including those of epilepsy and autism. "Consciousness As A Neurological Concept In Epileptology: a critical review" by P. Gloor (Epilepsia. 1986;27 Suppl 2:S14-26), notes the major practical problem from categorizing such impairments with needless conceptual weights:
Abstract at:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3720710 "This essay explores the usefulness of the concept of consciousness in epileptology and concludes that it does not further the understanding of seizure mechanisms and brain function. The reasons for this are both theoretical and empirical. Consciousness cannot be adequately defined. This may explain why attempts at accounting for it in neurobiological terms have failed. Epistemological and scientific arguments are reviewed which suggest why a satisfactory explanation of consciousness is not now and may never be possible. There are, however, aspects of conscious experience such as perception, cognition, memory, affect, and voluntary motility that are open to neurobiological research. Careful observations of epileptic seizures with "loss of consciousness" often reveal that only some components of consciousness are impaired. "Loss of consciousness" during a seizure, often presenting as unresponsiveness, may be due to aphasia, inability to perform voluntary movements, ictal or postictal amnesia (sometimes with preservation of memory during the ictus itself), or to diversion of attention by a hallucinated experience. A plea is made to observe accurately and interact with the patient during an attack in order to distinguish between these various behavioral disturbances masquerading as 'loss of consciousness.'"
"Brain Damage" makes using the phrase "distributed neuronal matrix" for "holographic" more revealing (this article and many of its references are cited in scores of books that use the buzzword "holographic"), "Experiential Phenomena of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy" by Pierre Gloor (1989), (Brain (1990), 113, 1673-1694), and on the Full Text PDF download: pages 1686-1691 (Mona Lisa for Liberals, the other guy for conservatives):
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content ... 3.abstract I don't much like the concept of "consciousness" (I prefer "self-induced autoclitic(?)" Skinner version), but others use "wild & wide" concepts of consciousness (consciousness during sleep (unconsciousness consciousness)???): "How To Study Consciousness Scientifically" by John R. Searle (1998), (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B (1998) 353, 1935-1942)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 854266.pdf Here's a big list:
http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/met ... essBib.pdfThen, it is often held that a rock has a "consciousness", with the cyclical buzz-fad of Panpsychism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PanpsychismTadzio
01 Apr 2012, 11:44 am
