Can consciousness be non-local?

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Like many other people I'm fascinated by the whole business of consciousness and while it still holds a few good mysteries, that doesn't give people license to jump off into hyper-fantasy space. When most people talk of souls (a purely philosophical term) I would say that they're generally thinking of something such as "their inner self as developed over a lifetime of subjective experiences". People also variously describe soul as "inner light", "spirit" or "mind" although use of the latter would indicate to me that someone was trying to avoid religious connotations. These are all informal concepts because science has yet to get a proper grip on the slippery phenomenon of subjective consciousness and hence dictate the formal terminology.

Taking soul as it is generally understood by those that use the term, the best reason I can think of to dismiss the notion of Pansychism (toasters having souls) is that we can expect a soul to possess a rich subjective viewpoint and this would entail a minimum amount of sensory information. If the counter to this was that the soul is magic enough to avoid the need for material sensors and such, then why have living things acquired eyes and ears etc. In a world populated by magical souls such material artifacts would be a pointless waste of precious resources. But why are we even bothering to reason against magical argument? Because quite a few otherwise sensible people don't even realize that they're appealing to magic.

The same argument can be used against the notion that human souls are somehow independent on their material bodies for their existence thus making them immortal (actually, this would be two separate arguments but most people appear to miss this in their headlong rush for immortality). What people mean by soul is also clearly affected by physical trauma - personality is unfortunately amenable to drastic alteration through accidental damage to the brain. If a kind-hearted soul becomes a stinking meanie after a serious head injury then the soul has an evident dependency on the material integrity of the head.

The trouble is that while the argument for souls being non-local is actually true if we think of the literary uses for such synonymous terms as disembodied spirits of comradery or bravado, the phenomenon of subjective consciousness cannot be non-local for the reasons given above (and plenty more). It comes close at times, if we consider the proximity of "like minds" and if vast amounts of technology were applied to creating a functional equivalent to any given brain, I can see no reason why subjective consciousness would not be present in both places. But that's not what people are thinking about when they speak about souls (except perhaps for Mr Iain M Banks)

Given the fact of entanglement there are non-local physical processes, so I suppose consciousness could be non-local. However there not a smidgin of evidence to indicate that it exists anywhere but in a working brain.

ruveyn

One of the strongest arguments against having a soul is studies made of people who have had their corpus callosum severed. I'll post a few links in a moment. In essence the corpus callosum is the bunch of nerve fibres that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Severing these nerves results in two independent personalities, each with their own independent streams of consciousness; sensory input, memories, thought processes and with independent volition.

Their independent streams of consciousness are as independent as yours and mine. To me this indicates that if a soul exists then it is possible to cut it into two with a scalpel! What does that say about consciousness and the concept of souls?

Some links here

Wrong. One side (the right, typically) remains only marginally conscious, just as it always has been, but is now able to 'surprise' the left side - which no longer has access to the right's vague impressions and semiconscious stirrings before they reach the final stages of being thought through (or even acted out). Note I did not highlight 'sensory input', as this has little to do with the conscious self in non-autistics.

I'd like to see if you can prove me wrong, since I haven't time to wade through your links for whatever passages you used to reach the conclusion I quoted - in which case, though, I would still suggest that a newly incarnate 'stream of consciousness' has formed in the right side of the brain, leaving the original confined to the left.

I remember one thinker arguing that we should understand consciousness to have truly 'split' in these cases, but he provided only mystical 'a-haa' noises to justify his argument.

@undefineable.

Take your pick; there are lots of scientific studies. A few seconds searching brought up this interesting example:

Both hemispheres seem demonstrably conscious to me!

Link to source article

I was curious about the same thing: I know from casual research that splitting the hemispheres produces quite a lot of wonkiness, but I've never heard about them gaining a full-on split personality and all that.

However, another look at the wikipedia article on it showed that the two hemispheres do seem to have separate "attentional systems" with particular strengths and weaknesses. So, some element to a split stream of consciousness seems to be present, just from looking at the wiki article.

Buddhists accept the concept 'mind', but dismiss 'soul' as harmful nonsense because the concept implies the assertion of eternally unchanging self-substance.

As to the non-locality of consciousness, a localised consciousness seems to contravene you science types' beloved "Occam's Razor" in a serious way:

Since we experience our consciousness as a brute fact rather than a theory of some kind, it demands an explanation. In fleshing out the subject of investigation, we find it to be dependent on physical artifacts and only able to report directly (on the world) by means of those artifacts. However, going on to grant consciousness some kind of localised material substance/energy/force to 'ride on the back' of (metaphorically and/or literally) raises more questions than it answers - What special quality makes the substance have an inwardly-experienced nature as well as the usual objectively-observable one? What makes that special quality self-evidently special? And so on and so on.

On the other hand, accepting consciousness as a non-local phenomenon nonetheless tied to a particular 'locale' is already accommodated by the flexibility of quantum mechanics and so on.

Not wishing to play on your screen-name, but if consciousness is indeed a brute fact then just what is it? It's only right that we should have to define our terms (Dennett and Kinsbourne 1992 p.240)

{My emphasis - We can agree that proof is lacking.}

Also, in
http://www.nature.com/news/the-split-br ... es-1.10213
, the subject reports (with my emphases): “I'd reach with my right for the thing I wanted, but the left would come in and they'd kind of fight,”

This implies migration of conscious connections to the right side of this woman's brain.

The problem with empirical reasoning, in this kind of situation, is that the conclusion that seems obvious given the data (in this case 'consciousness is split in two') is absurd from a commonsense point of view. This doesn't guarantee its falsehood, but should make us reflect that the obvious conclusion is not always the right one when data is limited (in this case partly by subjectivity; another case would be geocentrism) and that it often throws up problems of its own that demand further explanation (in this case the questions of where the old consciousness went and where the new ones have come from), despite its initial problem-free appearance.

I'm aware that mental processes among autists are, in general, more weighted towards consciousness and away from unconsciousness than among 'normals'. However, that shouldn't blind us to the fact that even we can and do perform some actions subconsciously sometimes, or prevent us from feeling out 'mental models' for people in the process of performing more-obvious actions that way themselves.

Last edited by undefineable on 05 Aug 2012, 10:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm aware that the actual definition of this word has never been fixed in English, as the cultures of the societies that spoke the language never addressed it directly in the way scientists and others are doing now.

I'd define consciousness as awareness. One intense form of consciousness would be meta-awareness, i.e. "Aware that I'm aware", but I wouldn't limit my definition to this definitively human phenomenon. {I'd even extend it to the feeling, normal among foetuses?, of "aware, but not aware of anything", as well as to the feeling -normal among newborns?- of "Aware, but unsure what I'm aware of".}

I hope we can agree that this is indeed a 'brute fact', as well as a useful starting-point for investigation.

Last edited by undefineable on 05 Aug 2012, 10:06 am, edited 1 time in total.

Another thought - The same 'stream of consciousness' may be experiencing occasional 'blips' of experience from the less-conscious side of the brain that are then lost to short-term memory as the dominant side resumes control, as in [day]dream-?

It was an interesting article but the part you quote actually implies both hemispheres of the brain are conscious and independently making decisions, since each hemisphere was independently controlling each hand what other explanation could there be? The vocal half using the word "I" was baffled by the non-vocal "other" acting independently. Your statement about migration of conscious connections doesn't make any sense - what exactly are you trying to say?

why presume that the character of each hemisphere is actually reflective in any way, of the soul?

The question then becomes "What is a soul?". The thing most people hold dearly as "themselves" is their independent volition, personality, thoughts and memories. If these things can be cut up with a scalpel then what is a soul?

One man's implication is another man's fanciful speculation I guess. I didn't spell it out, but hands don't always move by our conscious volition - take epilepsy for example. Animals such as jellyfish that lack a central nervous system often move independently too (albeit by simpler means), but they still lack the artifact that has shown to be associated with consciousness.



If I use the word 'I', I do not mean 'that part of me that uses words'. This suggests that the entire conscious portion of the subject's mind was baffled by the actions of her un-/sub-conscious 'Other'.



I meant that the subject was helping form and experiencing the conscious intentions of the left side of her brain (I forgot about the left-right crossover for a moment!), but was no longer aware of any conscious mental activities that might have caused the actions that the left side of her brain was performing. This implies that her conscious mental life had become even more restricted to the left side of her brain than is usual among humans.

We're talking about consciousness, not souls

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, I do not hold my outward personality, thoughts, or memories dearly as 'myself'. {My autism never allowed me enough of these to hold onto, so I used to satisfy myself with volition/wanting instead.} If we're happy to 'go with the flow' of both the inevitable and unexpected changes in those features, we see far more easily that there's something at the heart of us (either the consciousness we know or something more) that seems even happier to mould itself in order to 'fit in' to whatever independent volition, personality, thoughts and memories there may be as circumstances will allow.

C'mon, people, you could have been born NT - What's your soul now??

Last edited by undefineable on 05 Aug 2012, 10:58 am, edited 2 times in total.