Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you’d have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone’s brain: that experience of pointing at someone’s brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.
Not to be confused with Solipsism, that’s the thinking mind. I’m talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.
This is actually an implication on one of the worlds leading theory of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory. It gives a mathematical measure of consciousness (as integrated information) and one of the surprising implications of that is that theres actually no matter that has zero integrated information. If we use this metric to measure human consciousness the implication is that a rock, say, has a small amount of consciousness.
Of course this theory is not without its issues, and I don’t personally subscribe to it, but I think it goes to show you that we all need to be more open minded to alternative possibilities to the typical “consciousness is just neurons firing” view. We don’t actually understand consciousness well enough to be jumping to that conclusion yet.
Yeah I feel you on that one. People who haven’t looked into this topic think that you have to think that consciousness is nothing more than neural firings or youre some sort of religious apologist, even though when you actually look into what researchers in this field are saying they are in large part skeptical of that viewpoint
You’d have to prove all matter has consciousness for this right? Rocks, the sun, hydrogen atoms. We have evidence for the existence of reality before life but not the other way around.
Science-based thinking has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it.
The scientific method has never proved anything ever. It just fails to disprove, and the theory gets stronger every single time.
I would posit that you (and Plato) are just wildly defining undisprovable concepts that serve no purpose and can neither be proven nor disproven. Which makes your hypothesis more like a religion.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive. This is a very active area of research, and sometimes philosophical ideas like this can be the launchpad from which new scientific theories can be constructed.
An example of this is panpsychism (the idea that all matter has some level of consciousness). Many consider this a woo-woo theory. But now we have Integrated Information Theory, which is probably the most popular theory of consciousness right now. And it is a panpsychist theory: if its mathematical measure of consciousness is correct, then all matter would have some nonzero level of consciousness.
Now, I don’t subscribe to this theory, but thats not the point. My point is that with immature fields of research like this, we have to tolerate philosophical speculations (we have to start from somewhere, right?). So though you may not like these speculations right now, there is a really real chance they may the groundwork for an innovative scientific theory.
So let’s not immediately shut down these ideas by labelling them as “religion”. Lets give these ideas room to breathe, grow and mature, because thats how we make progress when we’re just starting out.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive. This is a very active area of research
Well, like with all religions speculative fields with zero evidence back it, I’ll consider it further when they present some empirically testable claims. Right now, it rests on the same level as “The rock-god Unk-Amun who lies in backyard created the universe via timetravel, which can be shown by the number of atoms in Unk-Amun”.
Or possibly “The number of peas on my dinnerplate shows the level of my household’s Runath”. What is Runath? Well, it’s obviously the thing that’s measured by the number of peas on my dinnerplate.
If you want to be that guy who dismisses the most well respected theory from a field you know nothing about, then okay. Just know that this makes you sound very stupid.
It’s an untestable “theory” that has no predictive power and explains nothing. It could be entirely true or entirely false and it would make no difference. It’s literally useless.
There’s the obvious one implied by the name, that states of consciousness will be associated with high degrees of integrated information.
This can be used to predict who will recover from a coma:
Moreover, IIT leads to experimental predictions, for instance that the loss and recovery of consciousness should be associated with the breakdown and recovery of information integration.
ITT predicts that directed grids should be found especially in brain
areas devoted to the perception of stimulus sequences, most likely
in auditory areas dealing with sounds, speech, and music, but also
in areas dealing with visual or body motion. This prediction could
be tested through methods well suited to examining anatomical
and functional connectivity at the level of individual neurons or
minicolumns
According to IIT, the seat of consciousness is instead likely to be in the sensory representation in the back of the brain, where the neural wiring seems to have the right character.
. . .
The test subjects would be presented with a series of varied images, such as faces, clocks and letters of the alphabet in different fonts. They would see each image for 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. At the beginning of each series, two specific images would be defined as targets (say, the face of a woman and a vintage clock), and participants were given the reporting task of pressing a button if they saw either of them. Other faces and objects in the images would therefore be task-relevant (because they fell into the same categories as the targets), but no report was required. Other types of images in the series, such as alphabet letters and meaningless symbols, would be task-irrelevant. The test was run repeatedly with different targets in the series so that each set of stimuli could be tested as both task-relevant and task-irrelevant. State-of-the-art brain signal decoders would correlate neural firing patterns with what the subjects were seeing. . . . IT, on the other hand, predicted that the brain patterns of consciousness would vary with the tasks, because carrying out a task would involve the prefrontal cortex and perception stripped of a task would not. This “pure” form of consciousness would only require the sensory hot zone at the back of the brain. The connectivity and duration of the signals for consciousness of an image would match the duration of the visual stimulus.
The first prediction is that a subject’s conscious experience at a time can be affected by the disabling of neurons that were already inactive at that time. The second is that even if a subject’s entire brain is “silent,” meaning that all of its neurons are inactive (but not disabled), the subject can still have a conscious experience.
Scientific thought demands proof of consciousness using matter as the base assumption, yet matter itself is only ever observed through consciousness. It’s a circular trap: the method assumes what it’s supposed to prove.
Indeed, I can’t solve the problem of hard solipsism, but neither can you. I can only say that we’ve made a pretty successful run at things by just assuming we all share an objective reality.
And if that reality doesn’t exist outside my brain, I’m a pretty fucking impressively smart girl, with some really fucked up issues.
It’s not solipsism, as I specifically said in my first post. It’s idealism. There’s a significant difference. I suggest you read on it before throwing around terms.
Nope. If you want to say anything (matter, rocks) exist before consciousness, you’re going to have to prove it first. Else, you’re insisting on a materialist dogma.
Just because the idea is novel to you personally, doesn’t mean it’s outlandish.
Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you’d have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone’s brain: that experience of pointing at someone’s brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.
Not to be confused with Solipsism, that’s the thinking mind. I’m talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.
This is actually an implication on one of the worlds leading theory of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory. It gives a mathematical measure of consciousness (as integrated information) and one of the surprising implications of that is that theres actually no matter that has zero integrated information. If we use this metric to measure human consciousness the implication is that a rock, say, has a small amount of consciousness.
Of course this theory is not without its issues, and I don’t personally subscribe to it, but I think it goes to show you that we all need to be more open minded to alternative possibilities to the typical “consciousness is just neurons firing” view. We don’t actually understand consciousness well enough to be jumping to that conclusion yet.
Yeah, I haven’t looked into that one. Just read old philosophy and also a bit on analytic idealism from Bernardo Kastrup
https://philarchive.org/rec/KASAIA-3
It’s gaining a bit of mainstream recognition but… A lot of cultural baggage resists it.
Yeah I feel you on that one. People who haven’t looked into this topic think that you have to think that consciousness is nothing more than neural firings or youre some sort of religious apologist, even though when you actually look into what researchers in this field are saying they are in large part skeptical of that viewpoint
Unfortunately they’re not talking about IIT.
So more/less controversial depending on your views on mysticism I suppose.
You’d have to prove all matter has consciousness for this right? Rocks, the sun, hydrogen atoms. We have evidence for the existence of reality before life but not the other way around.
No.
All of those things exist inside A consciousness.
The scientific method has never proved anything ever. It just fails to disprove, and the theory gets stronger every single time.
I would posit that you (and Plato) are just wildly defining undisprovable concepts that serve no purpose and can neither be proven nor disproven. Which makes your hypothesis more like a religion.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive. This is a very active area of research, and sometimes philosophical ideas like this can be the launchpad from which new scientific theories can be constructed.
An example of this is panpsychism (the idea that all matter has some level of consciousness). Many consider this a woo-woo theory. But now we have Integrated Information Theory, which is probably the most popular theory of consciousness right now. And it is a panpsychist theory: if its mathematical measure of consciousness is correct, then all matter would have some nonzero level of consciousness.
Now, I don’t subscribe to this theory, but thats not the point. My point is that with immature fields of research like this, we have to tolerate philosophical speculations (we have to start from somewhere, right?). So though you may not like these speculations right now, there is a really real chance they may the groundwork for an innovative scientific theory.
So let’s not immediately shut down these ideas by labelling them as “religion”. Lets give these ideas room to breathe, grow and mature, because thats how we make progress when we’re just starting out.
Well, like with all
religionsspeculative fields with zero evidence back it, I’ll consider it further when they present some empirically testable claims. Right now, it rests on the same level as “The rock-god Unk-Amun who lies in backyard created the universe via timetravel, which can be shown by the number of atoms in Unk-Amun”.Or possibly “The number of peas on my dinnerplate shows the level of my household’s Runath”. What is Runath? Well, it’s obviously the thing that’s measured by the number of peas on my dinnerplate.
That does not speak in it’s favor.
If you want to be that guy who dismisses the most well respected theory from a field you know nothing about, then okay. Just know that this makes you sound very stupid.
It’s an untestable “theory” that has no predictive power and explains nothing. It could be entirely true or entirely false and it would make no difference. It’s literally useless.
This is false, it makes a number of concrete predictions and the theory is mathematically precise.
Really? Name one for me.
There’s the obvious one implied by the name, that states of consciousness will be associated with high degrees of integrated information.
This can be used to predict who will recover from a coma:
Source
Then there’s other stuff.
Source
Source
Source
Want me to keep going or is that enough?
🪨🧠🙏 Unk-Amun 🙏🧠🪨
I mean, he doesn’t demand worship, but you will get an extra burger during grilling if you say a prayer.
🙌 O’ mighty Unk-Amun, may you forever bestow double burgers alongside our Runath. 🙌
Scientific thought demands proof of consciousness using matter as the base assumption, yet matter itself is only ever observed through consciousness. It’s a circular trap: the method assumes what it’s supposed to prove.
Would it? I’d say that would depend on the theory being defended at the moment. Which one are you talking about, and how does it define consciousness?
I don’t need to defend the idea with the ideas of a system that hasn’t first proven itself.
To say anything about the world, you blatantly obviously need consciousness first. That’s the status quo. The burden of proof is on materialists.
I already gave definitions in my first post.
Burden of proof for what? That you need a brain to make observations of the world? That’s not a hard claim to support.
You, however, seem to assert some form of magical super-consciousness that seems utterly undisprovable
What would you know about brains if not for consciousness?
Ohhhhhh, its solipsism in a trenchcoat.
Indeed, I can’t solve the problem of hard solipsism, but neither can you. I can only say that we’ve made a pretty successful run at things by just assuming we all share an objective reality.
And if that reality doesn’t exist outside my brain, I’m a pretty fucking impressively smart girl, with some really fucked up issues.
It’s not solipsism he’s describing a view known as idealism
It’s not solipsism, as I specifically said in my first post. It’s idealism. There’s a significant difference. I suggest you read on it before throwing around terms.
So just to be clear, you think an electron is conscious in some small way? Or are you saying consciousness exists with or without matter?
Or rather, nothing exists until it is perceived?
Consciousness is the principle within which electrons exist.
Well then sounds like you’re suggesting the universe is consciousness in and of itself as many religions do.
I thought you were talking about panpsychism which at least has potential paths to falsifiability.
Falsifiability? Prove that matter exists before consciousness.
Rocks aren’t conscious.
Rocks have existed longer than brains.
The argument isn’t if rocks have individual consciousness.
The fact is that rocks exist inside consciousness.
Universe-is-a-brain theory, got it.
Trouble is the burden of proof lies with you on that.
Nope. If you want to say anything (matter, rocks) exist before consciousness, you’re going to have to prove it first. Else, you’re insisting on a materialist dogma.
Just because the idea is novel to you personally, doesn’t mean it’s outlandish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism