James_James_85 t1_ja9uwb0 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 10:14 PM

Reply to comment by LeykisMinion007 in /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 27, 2023 by BernardJOrtcutt

>he discusses the experiments he did over 30 years that allude to us all being tapped into one human consciousness.

One interesting paradox solved by a global consciousness is the issue of split brain patients. Patients who undergo a total corpus callosotomy have their two hemispheres completely separated. After the surgery, they emerge as two separately thinking entities, essentially two people in one body. If one imagines undergoing such a surgery, slowly closing their eyes as they drift away under the anesthetic, then waking up after. Which half would they find themselves as? I'd imagine wiring two separate brains together in the right way would cause them to start thinking they are one person instead of two as well. The traditional view that each individual has their own consciousness fails to explain such paradoxes or questions as "why am I aware of this body and not that body" or "why am I conscious of a body born in the 21st century instead of one in the year 3000", why am I conscious of a human body instead of a bird's, etc..

I had such a thought too, I imagine a single consciousness throughout the entire universe, which experiences the universe in varying degrees of awareness through completely separate entities (brains/brain simulations/...). However, it's important to note that even if this were true, no experiment would ever be able to establish any connection between separate organisms beside what can already be explained by the laws of physics. Whatever true consciousness is, it would appear that, paradoxically, it has absolutely no effect on our thoughts and decisions, or our subconscious, as all those processes can be traced back to neural interactions and chemical processes in the brain. Lesioning certain parts of the brain could for example mess with our decision making, personalities or memories.

>what sparks the initial thought in the brain?

Sensory input for example could serve as an initial spark. Certain types of neurons sometimes fire spontaneously too, due to certain chemical properties. I don't think true consciousness, whatever it is, can alter the path of a molecule or squeeze a neuron and cause it to fire, that just doesn't happen.

>I believe there’s much more to true consciousness than a bunch of 1’s and 0’s

I do to. It's easy enough to imagine why a complex enough brain would "think" it is conscious, but I could never see how it would be "truly" conscious. It's indeed a perplexing issue.

LeykisMinion007 t1_jaao5oo wrote on February 28, 2023 at 1:41 AM

That’s funny you mentioned split brain. I was going to dive into that with Ian McGilchrist’s work, but was trying to keep it somewhat short haha.

Yeah it’s odd to think of our normally conscious mind as a balance between two. I like your though on this. However, though outside stimulus can appear to be the cause of brain activity, wouldn’t there technically be some other function that initials the spark in reaction to the stimulus? And what about a thought not stimulated by external factors?

James_James_85 t1_jaaw0vj wrote on February 28, 2023 at 2:39 AM

>wouldn’t there technically be some other function that initials the spark in reaction to the stimulus?

Our sensory organs (retina, skin, ...) are what converts the different stimuli into electrical messages. These travel up the sensory nerves into the brain where they induce an endless train of activity, including the reactivation of memories, the complex neural process of decision making and so on. Even something as simple as a feeling of anxiety/hunger/feeling your heartbeats/... is considered sensory input, so it would be extremely hard to completely isolate the brain from it. These serve as cues to spark a certain though or memory, which in turn sparks other memories and so on in a continuous chain.

>And what about a thought not stimulated by external factors?

There are many types of neurons, some of which will periodically fire spontaneously due to certain chemical processes (e.g., pacemaker neurons). Even you were to perfectly isolate the brain, it would still have a baseline activity, and would still think. Though in this case I'd imagine you'd be drawing blanks most of the time, the activity would translate to random flashes of thoughts/memories here and there until one of them induces a new chain of coherent thoughts.

You could look at it as if the very initial spark was the first neuron that fired in your developing brain when you were a fetus, and your brain has been following an endless causal chain of neural activity, altered by incoming messages from the sensory nerves and noise from the spontaneously firing neurons.

Consciousness, whatever it is, seems to be "just along for the ride". Whatever activity is taking place in the brain, that is what you are conscious of, yet it has no influence on that activity. Hopefully science reaches the real answer soon, brain simulations is what I'm really excited about.