The overwhelming majority of people accept that drugs can temporarily alter someones personality and brain trauma can interfere with memory and or function. The fact that many of these same people also believe in a soul setups an odd sort of cognitive dissonance.
Anyway, for most neuroscientists results like this are far closer to conformation using an interesting technique than truly groundbreaking research.
I am not religious, but I feel something is not adding up in this purely scientific view of the world. I never tried to explain this thought to anyone else, because it's damn hard to explain. I will give it a try:
As far as science goes (or I understand it) the brain is just a neural network, which gets activated based on inputs and produces some outputs, like a computer does. Neurons can also self-activate, but that is not really the point. The point is consciousness would not be required for that. When look around me I see things. If my brain would just do input/output, there would be no need for me to see anything. I would just act without seeing/hearing/feeling consciously. I don't claim I have any idea about anything, but I feel like something is not adding up here on a fundamental level. I don't even know if other people experience the same thing or if they do indeed just act on inputs and have no idea what I am talking about.
I wonder if what I said made any sense to anyone and if any philosophers were considering the same thing.
You might like Douglas Hofstadter's book I Am a Strange Loop. He examines consciousness as a recursive feedback loop. The book has some hokey tangents, but I think it's a good presentation. btw, this book is much more accessible that Hofstadter's GEB. :)
Thanks. From the WP article it sounds like his ideas are somehow related to mine, but that he is viewing it from a completely different angle. Very interesting.
Thanks. This is what I am talking about (I think). I have a hard time understanding the counter-arguments though, without any background in philosophy beyond Plato. I will try again when I am less tired.
Are you talking about the self-awareness and introspection you perceive yourself as having?
Maybe, depends how you fill in those words. I guess you could write a computer program that has self-awareness, in the sense that it is able to talk about itself. That is not what I meant.
Does it help if you view your consciousness as both being produced by the brain, and used as an input - i.e. a key part of a feedback system?
I'd even say that this is what most likely is going on, but it opens a completely different can of worms, with questions like: Does the part responsible for the consciousness (let's call it soul for lack of a better word) survive after you die? This realization tipped the scale for me from "No, that is just wishful thinking." to "I have no clue, but it is slightly more likely that it does, than that it does not.".
It's very annoying that I can barely talk about this without using words, which have been claimed by people, who hold believes I consider completely irrational.
Your thinking of a basic classifier Neural net from an AI class. But, that's a poor analogy for anything more complex than reflexes. We have both short and long term memory, and we can do planning. A really simple way to thank about short term memory is to have a single neuron in a feed back loop. Basically it's output leads to it's input and it can be switched on and off. Of course real neurons have far more than just 3 connections and tend to work in fairly large networks, but it's gives you an idea of how you can have a short term memory you keep cycling though the lyrics of some song and it's 'stuck in your head'.
Long term memory is a physical change in the layout of a neural network. Spend long enough walking around a new city and there is an abstract but physical map that's actually stored in the layout of neurons in your head. At the same time pieces of that layout represent locations on the map and how they connect to other locations. Think of an entrance to a parking lot and you might have a fairly static picture of the location linked to the choice of where that will take you if you go there. (So short term memory is now a neuron that cycles, a network that picks which target network to activate, and a network that represents something, plus feedback to turn on and off the targeting.)
So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions. When you say Apple to your self your actually activating neurons that keep cycling Apple over and over. Picture yourself tossing a ball and your thinking thinking about starting the cascade of muscle memory that causes you to through something while picking the perimeters of where you want the ball to end up and how hard you want to to hit the target, and possibly the position you need to be in to actually be able to through the ball. You can play around with the outcomes of if I do this that will happen by checking what neural net's predict the outcome will be. Chess is a great analogy for this, players don't think about moves as picking a piece up and moving it somewhere else, but what it means when the piece is in a new location. Though experience, education, or just thinking about things you can even train these neural networks to get better at those predictions.
Of course the actual implementation of these things is horribly complex, and many of the specifics are not all completely understood / studied. Also, chemicals play a major role, there are actual chemicals that represent things like pleasure in the brain. EX: Cocaine mimics the mostly hard coded chemical reward response for things like having sex by blocking the dopamine reuptake transporters. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1704
PS: Still I hope this simplified model helps you understand what's going on.
So what's consciousness? It's the ability to think about things as abstractions.
No, it's not! (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness). Artificial NNs can also model memory (see Hopfield networks). However, I just used them as an analogy. Maybe Zombies work better for you and the Philosophical Zombie Wikipedia page does a better job of explaining the idea (thanks again xyzzyz).
Perhaps if I reword that a little you might understand what I mean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness is the subjective experience of the ability to think about things and processes as abstractions. Apple, Airplane, Alphabet, Algebra, Balance, Self, or Obama they all exist as arrangements and connections of neurons in your brain. When a song is stuck in your head that's a physical thing that's happening to a some neurons in your head. But, so is everything else your thinking about.
These networks also connect to and build off of other abstractions so ((((peanut) + butter) + Jelly) + Sandwich) is built from more than one of these networks. Try and think of a pile of peanut butter next to some grape jelly. No problem it's brown next to purple.
Now try and do that for peanut butter next to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Most people feel something odd happen on the second one because they are reusing the peanut butter network for both of those. For me, I can't focus on their colors at the same time.
Getting back to Consciousness, it's turning on these abstractions by choice. I want to think about Apple so I activate the Apple network and suddenly experience Apple. And it's the same network as if I had just read the word or saw a physical Apple. Language also get's mapped to this which is part of why philosophers think about thinks like platonic ideals yes there is an ideal Chair it exists and it's the Chair classifier in your head.
I don't think it makes any sense to talk about this any further, we might as well be speaking different languages. Otherwise you could also comment here, https://hackernews.hn/item?id=3747462. Naveensundar did a better job explaining it.
"The fact that many of these same people also believe in a soul setups an odd sort of cognitive dissonance."
There's no cognitive dissonance if you believe that the brain influences consciousness but aren't committed to the idea that the brain is the source of consciousness. E.g. you could believe that the brain is a reducing valve, a la Huxley, and there is no cognitive dissonance there at all.
When one's core beliefs have no basis in logic or objective reality, it's simple to maintain consistency. All that's needed is the invention of some new concept to explain the discrepancy.
The world created in days -> but a "day" could be a million years.
Evolutionary theory -> but <creator> is driving the evolution
etc...
"When one's core beliefs have no basis in logic or objective reality, it's simple to maintain consistency. All that's needed is the invention of some new concept to explain the discrepancy."
Anyway, for most neuroscientists results like this are far closer to conformation using an interesting technique than truly groundbreaking research.